Expense Account, Mint
When I met the head of one of the largest private sector life insurance companies last week in Mumbai, he was clear that the 1 October 2013 deadline to re-engineer the traditional (money-back, endowment, whole life) plans in life insurance would at most be breached by two weeks to a month. (Market-linked plans, the unit-linked insurance plans, or Ulips, got a makeover in 2010). He said that most private sector companies he knew had their basic product suites in place and were ready to bring the new products to the market by 1 October. He said that the regulator had been working hard to approve at least one product in each category for every company in the industry. Mint Money spoke to several other private sector life insurance companies which said the same thing: we are ready. So what happened that the industry has been given a three-month extension when most companies were ready to go?