Insurance: which intermediary is better for buying a policy?
₹28,000 then. By 2021, it had risen to ₹47,643. Instead of renewing the policy, he decided to port it to another insurer.
“I used to get a lot of calls from an online broker about porting the policy. I checked out other insurance policies in the market and told the sales executive to make sure the new policy offers the same benefits as the old one. He confirmed the same and ported the policy to another private insurer at a premium of ₹32,145," he says.
Unfortunately, Lamba’s father had to be hospitalized the same year. The insurer insisted on a 30% co-payment since his father was now more than 60 years old. As per the co-payment terms, an insured agrees to bear a percentage of the medical bills.
“Since it was a ported policy and not a fresh one, the co-pay shouldn’t have been applicable. I paid the 30% in the hospital but I contested it later. It took me months to fight my case over their unreasonable demands.
They even asked me to produce policy documents of the last eight years with the previous insurer, among others," he says. Lamba, too, fought a lone battle with no support from the intermediary. There is hardly any due diligence done by insurers or intermediaries when they onboard a policyholder.
Troubles start when the insured file a claim and realize they are left to fend for themselves. The next-door agent Intermediaries are of various types: individual or corporate agents, brokers, web aggregators and point of sales people (POSP). Banks, non-banking financial services, and e-commerce platforms such as Amazon, Flipkart are corporate agents.
Banks are the most dominant in this segment. Experts say you should avoid buying policies from a bank unless you personally know someone there. In most cases, relationship
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