IRDAI has recently notified the extension of its sandbox regulations by another 2 years to enable the completion of the experiment of existing sandbox proposals and also to allow new sandbox proposals for the experiment.
The original sandbox regulations released in 2019 indicated that IRDAI could run them for 2 years. The idea was to run the sandbox for 2 years and then take a view on how things work. However, with the delays caused by COVID-19, among other things, the first year of applications themselves took too long to roll out and be completed. Hence, the current notification has extended the regulations by another 2 years.
Naval Goel, Founder and CEO, PolicyX.com, remarked, “There is merit in this extension of regulatory sandbox, which is established for live testing of new products or services. This amendment will help drive innovation in the insurance sector as insurance companies will now be able to experiment considerably without taking approvals to launch a new product.”
Aatur Thakkar, Co-Founder & Director, Alliance Insurance Brokers, stated, “The first set of approvals involved evaluating as high as 173 proposals received in 3 months. The high-powered committee appointed for this purpose evaluated these proposals and gave the nod for 33 of them. The approvals were time-bound for 6 months from 1 February 2020. The second and third tranches contained 16 and 18 approvals, for similar 6 months periods from 1 May 2020 and 1 July 2020, respectively. This was followed with a second cohort of filings for which IRDAI had provided a window between 15 September 2020 and 14 October 2020. The filings were larger in number than the first cohort, totaling 185.”
