INSURANCE INFORMATION BUREAU (IIB)

Insurance Information Bureau (IIB) was formed in October 2009 with the objective of facilitating in the efficient functioning of the insurance sector as well as for the protection of the interests of the policyholders by providing reliable, timely and accurate information on the industry.

The IIB aims to act as a single point of official reference for the entire insurance industry data and also to ensure that the data is available to various market players, researchers, policyholders and the public at large for real time decision making. IIB presently collects transaction-level data on Motor, Health, Fire, Marine and Engineering segments from all the insurers in the online mode.

It also publishes periodical reports on Motor, Health and other lines of business. The industry aggregates, published by IIB, enable companies to set internal benchmarks within the company. In addition to the periodical reports, IIB also publishes ad-hoc reports in order to cater to the various specific needs of the stakeholders of the industry.

Some of the recently published ad-hoc reports include the following:

• Claim Development Analysis of Motor Third Party Claims,
• Motor Third Party Claims Analysis of claim severity by time lag bands and nature of loss,
• Health Data Claim analysis by types of payment, and
• Health Data Claims analysis on medical inflation.

The IIB is also involved in other initiatives such as, Claims History Search, Stolen Vehicle Search, Call center facility to collect Recovery of Stolen Vehicles information from Police, Vehicle Insurance Status Search (for Accident Victims), etc.

The Claims History search tracks the claims history of a vehicle over a period of time irrespective of the insurer and gives the details of claims made on the vehicle. The Stolen Vehicle Search facility enables insurers to verify whether the vehicles being insured are already a stolen one or not, by searching from the Stolen Vehicles Database of IIB.

The IIB has established a call center facility, namely Stolen Vehicles Recovery Information System (SVRIS) whereby Police provide the information on the stolen and subsequently recovered vehicles. It has also provided a public search facility for the extensive use of accident victims in case of an emergency situation to get the insurance details of vehicle involved in the accident.

The IIB has also developed and introduced a Vehicle Insurance Status SMS System (VISSS), which provides an additional mechanism to look into the insurance status of the vehicle. This service is provided to the registered mobile numbers.

It helps the Police/Regional Transportation IRDA (RTA) to track uninsured vehicles on road and also to get confirmation about whether a vehicle is a stolen one or not. The way forward for IIB is to standardize the data elements used in the insurance industry, real time collection of data from insurers, single point of data source for the needs of all stakeholders, etc.

Further, the IIB is in the process of collecting data for the remaining lines of business in the non-life insurance segment as well as on the life insurance segment.

The IIB is also exploring to employ advanced analytics to produce various advanced outputs, including the following:

• Aggregate reports including Nat Cat accumulations;
• Interactive Possibilities for Insurance Industry, Police, Cargo movers, Hospitals, Policyholders;
• Analytical reports e.g. Trends, Time series, Geo/Macro-economic/demography correlations with insurance, claims occurrence patterns;
• On demand bespoke reports.

An analysis based on the transaction level data on the Motor segment, as submitted by insurers to IIB, brought out many interesting facts. Some of the important findings are as follows:

• It was observed that new vehicles (which are less than one year old) account for 31 per cent of total vehicles insured in the country. On the claims front, the new vehicles contribute 38 per cent in total Own Damage (OD) Claims and 27 per cent in total Third Party (TP) claims.
• Only five states, viz. Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Karnataka and Uttar Pradesh account for 49 percent of all vehicles insured in the country.
• The findings also demonstrate that 24 per cent of Own Damage (OD) claims are instances of multiple claims involving the same vehicle. Further, in private car segment, 7 per cent of OD claims pertain to policies which made more than 5 claims in a year.
• Though, Third Party (TP) claims accounted for only 29 per cent of total claims made in a year (the remaining 71 per cent are OD claims), it contributed 54 per cent of total claim amount paid. This highlights the severity of TP claims when compared to OD claims.
• The data shows that the industry is focusing on issuing of Comprehensive Policies as these account for 84 per cent of all motor policies issued.
• Though “Two-wheelers” as a class of vehicle form 58 per cent of total motor policies issued, it contributed meager 11 per cent of total motor insurance premium.
• On the claims settlement front, in case of TP claims, it has been observed that only 3.78 per cent of the claims incurred pertains to the policies issued during the year 2011-12, while the corresponding amount of claims for the same period is 14.23 per cent.

Courtesy IRDA Annual Report 2011-12