IRDAI’s public insurance registry: what it is, and why every sale needs a name attached
IRDAI’s public insurance registry aims to record the name of every agent, broker, or intermediary behind a policy sale, giving regulators and buyers a traceable record of who sold what.
IDAI:; India's proposed Public Insurance Registry aims to create a unified digital record of insurance policies, making policy verification and access simpler for customers.
New Delhi: Every mis-sold insurance policy should be traceable back to the individual who actually sold it — not just the bank or broker that facilitated the sale — Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (Irdai) chairman Ajay Seth said on Saturday. Such a database, he said, does not currently exist.
Speaking at the Insurance Brokers Association of India’s (Ibai) silver jubilee conclave in New Delhi, Seth said mis-selling remains one of the industry’s biggest problems, and that fixing it will require holding individual salespeople accountable — not just the intermediaries they operate under.
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IRDAI: What is the public insurance registry
IRDAI is working on a Public Insurance Registry (PIR) — a single digital record that would track every insurance policy a person owns, from the day it’s issued to the day a claim is settled. The regulator discussed the proposal with industry stakeholders in New Delhi in March, alongside Bima Sugam, the insurance sector’s long-delayed digital marketplace.
The timing isn’t coincidental. IRDAI’s own annual report for FY25 shows grievances classified as “unfair business practices” — the regulatory term for mis-selling — rose to 26,667, up about 14% from the previous year, even as total complaints against life insurers stayed roughly flat. In other words, a growing share of what’s going wrong in Indian insurance traces back to how policies are sold, not how claims are processed.
IRDAI: What the registry actually does
The PIR is designed as a consent-based system that links every policy a person holds to a single, permanent identifier — a PAN, Aadhaar or mobile number — rather than to a physical document. Every insurer, public or private, would feed policy data into it: issuance, premiums, claims history, grievances, the works.
The same logic is meant to apply on the selling side. Today, in bancassurance and broker-led sales — channels that together account for a large share of distribution — insurers typically record only the intermediary institution against a policy, not the individual employee or agent who advised the customer. A salesperson responsible for repeated mis-selling can switch employers with no record following them. The PIR is meant to close that gap by tagging every policy with the identity of the point-of-sale person, agent or advisor who actually sold it — carrying that record forward even after a job change. This is the specific piece Seth was pointing to on Saturday.
The closest comparison, on the customer side, is the consolidated account statement that mutual fund investors already use — one login, every holding, regardless of which fund house issued it. IRDAI wants the same for insurance: one place to see every policy a person owns, across every insurer.
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IRDAI: Why regulators think this curbs mis-selling
Three mechanisms do the work here.
Visibility kills duplication. A common mis-selling pattern involves selling a customer a policy they don’t need because the seller has no way of knowing what they already hold. A shared registry closes that information gap for every insurer and agent at the point of sale.
Disclosure becomes the insurer’s problem, not just the customer’s. Claim rejections often hinge on non-disclosure — a policyholder who didn’t mention a pre-existing condition or an old policy. If that data already sits in a shared registry, insurers lose the ability to reject claims on grounds they had the means to check themselves.
Mis-selling becomes traceable in real time, rather than surfacing only when a claim is filed or a policy lapses years later. That shortens the window in which a bad sale can go undetected — and, with a seller ID attached, makes it possible to act on the person responsible rather than just the institution.
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IRDAI: What’s still unresolved
IRDAI hasn’t published a firm rollout date, and the mechanics of two things remain open: how decades of paper-based policies get digitised and fed into the registry, and how consent will actually work for a customer base where digital literacy varies widely. Both have been sticking points for Bima Sugam as well, which has faced repeated delays since it was first proposed.
Industry participation is also not yet mandatory in any published regulation — the March meeting was described as a stakeholder discussion on design and roadmap, not a directive.
The bottom line
The PIR reframes insurance mis-selling as a data problem rather than purely a conduct one: if every insurer can see what a customer already owns, and every customer — and regulator — can see exactly who sold them what, the two most common failure points — duplicate selling and unaccountable sellers — become far harder to exploit. Whether it delivers on that will depend entirely on execution: clean data, real insurer participation, and a registry customers actually know exists.
