In an effort to float to a big broking entity in insurance sector, top bourse BSE on Thursday said that it received the all neccesary approvals of the market regulator Sebi and will soon launch a joint venture with the world’s largest insurance exchange Ebix.
The move comes at a time India needs to create a robust distribution exchange platform for insurance products. The new venture will be named as BSE-Ebix. A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed in this connection on Thursday between the BSE Investments and Ebix Software India. The new entity in the form of BSE-Ebix would plan to unveil the insurance distribution exchange platform, that would allow distribution outlets, stock brokers, wealth management advisors and financial institutions across the country to sell life and non-life insurance products.
The platform would leverage Ebix's end-to-end insurance exchange technology and will enable customer relationship management, agency management, multi-quoting, underwriting, policy creation, claims filing and settlement, to back end insurance policy administration.
“We have got approval from Sebi to set up a broking entity in insurance but technology and execution is the difficult part and so we wanted to partner with somebody who has experience in this regard. We always partner with the top of the line institutions and Ebix fits into that framework,” BSE managing director and CEO Ashish Kumar Chauhan told PTI.
“Insurance is the large part of the Government’s vision to create safe secure life and we were looking to use digital in more useful way. BSE has huge reach and large network of brokers so we were thought of training some of them and bring them into this area (insurance),” he added. Chauhan also said BSE plans to use its network to provide fast, easy and automated distribution of insurance products. Ebix CEO Robin Raina said the joint venture, which would be rolled out after regulatory clearance, would be initially implemented on pilot basis in some regions to ensure seamless execution and that technology framework is ready and testing has kick-started.
Noting India is set to become one of the largest regions for insurance business even though the penetration of these products is currently less than 5 per cent, Raina said things are going to look up as the country's economy is growing and has huge part of its workforce is young.
“With a population of about 1.2 billion people and the largest growing middle class in the world, India is set to be a large insurance market - as wherever people create wealth, they tend to find ways to protect it through insurance,” he noted adding that Ebix plans to utilise the potential the country offers at the earliest.