Perfios Agent Verification API enables comprehensive onboarding and verification solutions for business customers, employees and partners.
Overview: Boots on the ground is still the most effective channel for insurance sales, despite the incursion of direct sales into the brick and mortar ecosystem. Insurance is a product that provides no tangible product or service to the customer other than the assurance of payout in the event of some condition being fulfilled. The amorphous nature of the product explains its severe under-penetration in developing markets. Hiring insurance agents is an activity that cannot be taken lightly. Even a single case of an agent mis-selling a product can set consumer confidence back significantly. Sales force onboarding and verification must be airtight and automated to ensure high security and scale.
As a matter of fact
The insurance sector hired more than 2.22 lakh insurance agents in FY 2022-23. With high attrition, poaching from competitors and ambitious growth targets, the need for automated background verification to reduce the burden of due diligence on agency channels and HR departments in the insurance sector has never been higher. With India emerging as one of the fastest growing markets for insurance penetration, the need of the hour is a one-stop onboarding and verification platform that gets boots on the ground with the shortest processing time.
Labor of love
Hiring insurance agents can be ponderous and inefficient. Conducting background verification for a thousand agents, with all the work that goes into identifying their agency status, employment history, date of license issue, certification details and other critical documents, can take an inordinate amount of time and cost precious man hours and sales.
Small slips cause big falls
Picture this. A minor error in due diligence leads to a blacklisted agent slipping through checks. This agent has multiple warnings and penalties against him issued by the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) and has been put on their blacklist. They have successfully managed to falsify their employment history and service details and now pose a major risk to your firm’s reputation. They may engage in claims fraud, conflict of interest, non-disclosure of customer details, misappropriation of renewal premiums, forgery, falsification of documents, cash defalcation, mis-selling and any of a hundred other ways in which they can subvert industry regulations to push a sale. A single report of agent fraud from a customer on a public platform can wipe out a decade of trust-building in this market.
The rule book
To protect customers from unscrupulous agents, IRDAI requires insurance agents to submit to a stringent background verification process and adhere to the rules outlined in the IRDAI
Appointment of Insurance Agents Regulations, 2016. No Insurance Agent shall:
1. Solicit or procure insurance business without being appointed to act as such by the insurer.
2. Induce the prospect to omit any material information in the proposal form.
3. Induce the prospect to submit wrong information in the proposal form or documents submitted to the insurer for acceptance of the proposal.
4. Resort to multilevel marketing for soliciting and procuring insurance policies and/or induct any prospect/policyholder into a multilevel level marketing scheme.
5. Behave in a discourteous manner with the prospect.
6. Interfere with any proposal introduced by any other insurance agent.
7. Offer different rates, advantages, terms and conditions other than those offered by his insurer.
8. Demand or receive a share of proceeds from the beneficiary under an insurance contract.
9. Force a policyholder to terminate the existing policy and to effect a new policy from him within three years from the date of such termination of the earlier policy.
10. Apply for fresh agency appointment to act as an insurance agent, if his agency appointment was earlier cancelled by the designated official, and a period of five years has not elapsed from the date of such cancellation.
11. Become or remain a director of any insurer.
What we do
Perfios has developed an Agent Verification API that conducts a two-step verification. The first level automatically verifies the agent’s PAN and Aadhar details and uses this information to check their agent status. The second level queries information on the consolidated IRDAI blacklisted agents list to flag any penalties or blacklist records against the agent. Agent verification can be done in minutes, making it a seamless background check for information on the active licenses an agent holds, and the status of previously held registrations/ licenses to determine their past performance.
In the case of terminated or blacklisted Agents, the following data points can be used to determine the further course of action on their application:
1. Agency Code
2. Date of Appointment
3. Date of Birth
4. Insurer Name
5. Insurer Type
6. License Number, if any previously held
7. Status of Agency (In force/Blacklisted/Terminated)
8. Date of Status Change
This API brings all relevant agent data into a single window and raises red flags where needed to the hiring department. It speeds up onboarding and eliminates human error resulting in wrong hires and allowing insurance firms to guarantee faster growth and better customer service.
About Perfios:
Perfios Software Solutions is India’s largest SaaS-based B2B fintech software company enabling 900+ FIs to take informed decisions in real-time. Headquartered in Mumbai, India, Perfios specializes in real-time credit decisioning, analytics, onboarding automation, due diligence, monitoring, litigation automation, and more.
Perfios’ core data platform has been built to aggregate and analyze both structured and unstructured data and provide vertical solutions combining both consented and public data for the BFSI space catering to their stringent Scale Performance, Security, and other SLA requirements.
You can write to us at connect@perfios.com
For more Such information contact us@ https://solutions.perfios.com/request-for-demo
