Insurance companies may now get a faster approval for new products they want to launch in the Indian market. The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority (IRDA) is keen that this happens and is already working on ways to expedite the approval process for products filed by insurance companies. The industry, particularly the general insurers, has been complaining for quite some time now for the long time that the regulator takes to approve products.

“We had filed four products, two each in health and motor segments, six-seven months ago. But the regulator has still not approved them. They have asked for certain clarifications but the list of such queries also took a long time to come,” said the head of a non-life company. “It is not true that all product approvals take more than six months. There is a lag of 20 per cent and the rest 80 per cent of the products filed are approved within 30 days to a couple of months,” IRDA chairman J Hari Narayan said. But he agreed that there was a mismatch between internal capacity and new proposals.