Insurance Self-Network Platform in India
What is an ISNP?
Insurance Self Network Platform or an ISNP, is an e-commerce portal dedicated to dealing with insurance services in India. E-commerce is prevalent in all forms of products and services these days. It has provided the providers of those products and services with better reach and low costs of transactions. To ensure that the same goes for insurance services, IRDAI, or India's Insurance Regulatory Development Authority, has provided the E-Commerce Insurance Self-Network Platform registration.
If you're willing to adhere to the conditions set forth by the IRDA, you can run your e-commerce portal dedicated specifically to selling insurance policies. This portal will be called the Insurance Self Network Platform (ISNP).
Objective of an ISNP
Insurance Self-Network Platforms (ISNPs) are an effective medium to increase insurance penetration and enhance financial inclusion cost-effectively. Hence, the Authority, as part of its developmental mandate, issues these guidelines to promote e-commerce in the insurance space, which is expected to lower the cost of transacting insurance business and bring higher efficiencies and greater reach.
Services offered by the ISNP
A registered ISNP can dispense the following services in an Insurance market:
- Issue Insurance Policy documents or certificates to the consumers.
- Assignment registration
- Nominations enlistment
- Nomination updations
- Manage insurance surrender, maturity, withdrawals, free-look cancellations, and return benefits.
- Payouts
- Organizing medical check-ups and submitting medical reports to the insurer in case of medical or life insurance.
- Issue insurance products endorsement
- Providing loans against insurance policies
- Fund Switching
- Updating Terms and Conditions of an Insurance policy
- Intimating changes in the Terms and Conditions of an Insurance policy to the policyholders.
- Collecting renewed premiums and issuing remittances to the insurer(s)
- Periodically updating customers' information.
- Declaration of Updates
- Extention of an insurance cover
- Review or cancel an insurance policy like
- Insurance Policy Transfer
- Duplicate Insurance Policy
- Death and Maturity Claims
Any other service relating to insurance products and services.
ISNP vs. Web Aggregator
An ISNP and an insurance web aggregator provide an interface to sell insurance products online. The only difference between them lies in their scalability. An insurance company that is an ISNP can onboard multiple web aggregators on its platform. It can pool the insurance policies from each aggregator, thus providing an integrated platform that hosts the comparison modules of each insurance web aggregator along with other insurers on the platform. Also, Multiple Insurance Web Aggregators can showcase their insurance policies on a single Insurance Self Network Platform. An ISNP can aggregate many Insurance Web Aggregators.