Financial services enterprise, Karvy, which has launched its Insurance Repository System (IRS) with approval from IRDA, is eyeing about 45 per cent of the total market share in the next 3years, a senior company executive said.
“We are well positioned in technology, operations, service network and marketing capability to run this business with the benefit of low cost and huge geographical reach. At present, there are 42 crore policies, which we hope will get converted to e-Insurance Account (EIA). We expect 40-45 per cent of this market share in next 3 years,” Karvy Insurance Repository executive director Viiveck Verma told PTI here.
However, if EIA is made mandatory by the regulator, the company may achieve this target early, that is in 18-24 months, Viiveck Verma added.
“We are the only Insurance Repository (IR) to be certified for ISO 27001 that guarantees data security, which is the main issue on Sunday. In two days, since the launch last week, we have opened 5,000 accounts,” Viiveck Verma added.
The company has already signed up with about seven life insurance companies for this purpose and will soon get all insurers under its portfolio, Viiveck Verma said.
“Initially, this facility is only for life insurance, as per the IRDA guideline, and will slowly be extended to health, motor, group in next few months in a phased manner,” Viiveck Verma said.
The Karvy Group is a leading integrated financial services group with over 67 million investors in various capacities, and provides investor services to over 1,200 corporates. It has a network of over 400 branch offices across the country, besides offices in Dubai,
Bahrain, New York and Singapore.
When asked if the company will launch IR at international platform, he said, “After this system stabilises in the country, we hope in next few months we may look at exploring the overseas market.”
Last week, Union Finance mnister P Chidambaram launched the IRDA's Insurance Repository System (IRS), which is first of its kind in the world.
IRDA has given five companies the status of insurance repositories and provided them licence that will be valid till July 31, 2014.
The five companies are: NSDL Database Management, Central Insurance Repository, SHCIL Projects, CAMS Repository Services and Karvy Insurance Repository.
The main objective of creating an insurance repository is to capture KYC data, convert the policies into electronic mode, protect them and take care of the ongoing servicing needs of policyholders.
They do this by opening an e-Insurance Account and tagging the insurance policies into this account.
The repository will issue a unique code number to all policy holders, and their policies will come under that number and will maintain a history of the policy details like claims, nominees, beneficiaries and other data.
This service is free for customers with no risk of loss or damage of insurance policies and saves them from the hassles of filling multiple KYC (Know Your Customer) forms whenever they apply for new policies.