(Image: visual representation of IRDA's Insurance Web Aggregator regulations) Two and a half years after it came up with incredibly myopic and disastrous Web Aggregator guidelines, India's insurance regulator IRDA doesn't appear to have learned much. In a set of regressive draft guidelines issued earlier this month (download), the IRDA is defining terms of contracts between Web Insurance Aggregators, which should only be viewed as marketing and comparison firms, defining the content that should be made available on their websites, disallowing advertising on these sites, and even determining the terms as per which leads should be transferred between a web insurance aggregator and an insurance company. What's remarkable is that the guidelines initially hint towards a change in approach: that they're switching from a licensing model to a registration model for web insurance aggregators. "On receipt of the fee and on satisfactory compliance of terms and conditions for grant of registration, the Authority shall grant the certificate of registration to act as an Insurance Web-Aggregator for which an application is made." However, what's the point of switching to registration, when the terms applicable will be just as limiting and onerous as a license, and as full of red-tapism as earlier? In the last set of guidelines, the license was for three years. Now the registration is valid for three years. The IRDA has to be the most regressive regulator in India, having converted what was merely an online comparison and marketing business into heavily regulated and burdened business. Some of the things…
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