With health insurance becoming more important than ever amidst the harsh second wave of covid-19, data from states across the country suggests that only 51% of the covid-19 claims received from the beginning of the pandemic have been settled. Tamanna Inamdar breaks down how to make your health insurance policy work for you on the India Development Debate tonight with Monika Halan, Author, Let’s Talk Money, Tarun Mathur, Co-Founder, Policybazaar.com and Naval Goel, CEO & Founder, PolicyX.com
On the India Development Debate, I spoke about the fact that insurance firms are not paying covid claims in full. The problem is only half with insurance contracts and firms. The other half has to do with hospitals padding costs. @TamannaInamdar@ETNOWlive
The problem with the insurance contracts are that they are mostly one-sided with the individual having very little bargaining power. Companies can refuse to pay or deduct the payout by interpreting the policy provisions in their own way. This is market failure. When there is market failure government needs to intervene to put down road rules. Insurance regulator needs an upgrade – that’s an easier part. India needs a regulator for hospitals urgently.
Insurance companies are in focus as the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) has received complaints about COVID policies not being offered and renewed. Atul Sahai, CMD of the New India Assurance Company and Monika Halan, Author of Let’s Talk Money shared their views.
“As far as New India Assurance is concerned, I don’t see this happening. This could be the approach adopted by some of the companies but in the wake of COVID, no new guidelines have been issued as far as we are concerned,” said Sahai.
“The need for health insurance has suddenly increased for most people. The new insurance buyer has got afraid that something may happen and is now running to buy insurance. Globally, insurance companies are struggling to understand this risk and to price this into premiums. So, different companies approach the cooling-off period differently. COVID-19 pandemic is a new event and everyone is struggling to find their balance with it and people seeking health insurance cover for the first time post COVID are in for a little bit of a rough ride unfortunately,” Halan added.
“This is a great time for the government and the regulator to set things right in terms of insurance,” Halan mentioned.
According to Halan, higher loading is expected for the new policy entrants.
“The companies will have to probably increase the premium for the entire age bucket. The price rise will be across the board and not specific to a person,” she mentioned.
Incurred Claim Ratio (ICR) is used to gauge whether this market is fair or not. The number is obtained by total claims paid divided by the total premium.
While explaining the current market condition, Halan shared, “If the net number is at 100 percent, then we are seeing a fair marketplace where after profit and cost, insurance companies are neutral.”
“According to data, the private insurance companies’ ICR is 53 percent, the standalone insurance companies’ number is 56 percent, and the PSUs are 92 percent, which means they are doing well. I think it is a complete regulatory failure because you are not being able to ensure that there is no gouging of the customer,” she further mentioned.
“We are not going to increase the premium till we tide over this crisis,” Sahai shared.
Mis-selling by banks has been flagged, caught and proven multiple times in the past decade, but nothing other than half-hearted circulars have emerged from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). For a regulator, that is also the central bank for a $3 trillion economy, busy with large issues like monetary policy and government debt, the consumer protection department is where staff is sent to be sidelined.
When the Yes Bank AT1 Bonds were extinguished, retail investors who had been sold these as FDs with a higher rate of interest, had thought that the RBI will do something about it and protect their interest. RBI, according to news reports, took the view that the risks were explained and there was no mis-selling. Investors wrote to Sebi as well and some of them have gone to court over being mis-sold. Curiously, it is the capital market regulator that has come to the aid of retail investors. Sebi took the complaints seriously, did a full investigation and found Yes Bank and three of its officials guilty of mis-selling in a 12 April 2021 order. It has fined Yes Bank Rs 25 crore, and Vivek Kanwar (managing director of the private wealth management team) Rs 1 crore. His team members Ashish Nasa and Jasjit Singh Banga have been fined Rs 50 lakh each. The case against Rana Kapoor will be taken on a parallel track since he is already in jail and unable to join the investigation fully.
Sebi found the following:
Yes Bank showcased the bond as a ‘Super FD’ and ‘as safe as FD’
The term sheet was not shared with all the investors
No sign off was taken from investors on their understanding of the features and risks of the product
Risk profiling of customers was not done, specially those who were more than 70/80/90 years of age
In the ‘verbal pitch’ shared by the private wealth management team with the Relationship Managers, the AT1 bonds were compared with fixed deposits on rate differential only, but omitted the risk differentials
There was a push from the MD & CEO of Yes Bank to down sell the AT1 bonds which led the private wealth management team to recklessly sell the bonds to individual investors
97% of the 1,311 individual investors who were sold these bonds were existing customers of Yes Bank
277 of these closed their FDs prematurely to invest in these bonds
Yes Bank and its officials had a fiduciary responsibility towards their customers and that was broken by selling them high risk bonds without explaining the full risk
Yes Bank did not have a system in place to ensure that a term sheet would be shared with retail investors nor was there any provision for taking a confirmation from investors with respect to their understanding of the risks
Policymakers, regulators and others working the space of consumer protection along with financialisation of Indian household savings must read the entire 61-page order carefully to see how an investigation must be done when dealing with disaggregated retail investors who do not have the ability to fight large corporations. In fact, I wrote a paper along with the team at Dvara Research that found retail investors were wary of buying AT1 bonds if the risk factors were clearly marked out. It seems that even this basic hygiene of just writing down the risk in the same manner that the returns were marked, was missing in the Yes Bank case.
Sebi has used RBI’s own regulations to find that Yes Bank was guilty of mis-selling. The order says that while initially RBI only allowed AT1 bonds to be sold to institutions, in a September 2014 order, it allowed them to be sold to retail as well, but with disclosures on the risks that such bonds carry. A specific sign off was required from retail investors saying that they understood the risks. RBI rules mandate that “all the publicity material, application form and other communication with the investor should clearly state in bold letters (with font size 14) how a subordinated bond is different from fixed deposit, highlighting that it is not covered by deposit insurance.” In addition, Sebi has used its own powers under the Sebi Act and under the Prevention of Fraudulent and Unfair Trade Practices Regulations and the fact that Sebi has oversight of listed bonds to carry out the investigation and pass this order.
The Sebi order has several non-linear take-aways. One, the naming of specific wealth managers and finding them guilty, rather than penalizing the lower staff should worry bank boards and managements that the long hand of Sebi can now reach them under the various regulations in place. I have always maintained that catching one junior bank employee will not solve the systemic problem of bank mis-selling in India. This has to be a board driven initiative.
Two, for Yes Bank this is an opportunity to transform the way banks in India treat their customers. Post the Rana Kapoor regime, the management has now been taken over by a bank consortium and there is a professional board in place. This crisis is a great opportunity for the bank to set a standard in customer protection by putting in place protocols that reinforce the fiduciary responsibility of a bank towards its customers.
Three, this may not end well for Sebi if the past is any indication of future events. Steps taken in earlier years with a view to protect retail investors have usually ended badly for those taking bold steps. In 2009 CB Bhave, the then chairman of Sebi did two big things in investor interest. One, he removed the front load in a mutual fund. Two, he went to court against the insurance regulator (IRDAI) saying that the Ulip was actually a mutual fund masquerading as an insurance since 90% of the premium was in a mutual fund like product. The government in 2010 issued an ordinance to rule that IRDAI controls the Ulips. Bhave was then moved out soon after. I fear that the investor-first team lead by Sebi chairman Ajay Tyagi is at risk in a similar fashion.
In fact, the recent Ministry of Finance intervention over the valuation of AT1 bonds that Sebi was putting in place in retail investor interest points to the road ahead. Bank lobbying derailed the move to provide safe spaces for pure retail investors to put their money to work.
Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman must look at the story from the point of view of retail investors and not from the lobbying by firms, other regulators and bureaucrats who have caused an open loot of retail money through regulated entities like banks and insurance companies over the years.
Monika Halan is India’s trusted personal finance writer, speaker and author who helps families get their money decisions right.
Retail investors are the last to know when things go wrong with their money. This is especially true of difficult-to-value-and-trade (in India) financial products such as bonds. The story gets even more complicated on how to treat bonds that behave like (or worse than) equity – for example AT1 bonds. AT1 bonds are issued by banks to shore up core capital base to meet BASEL III norms. These are unsecured, perpetual, high-risk bonds. Banks can skip paying interest on these bonds if their capital ratios fall below certain threshold level. These bonds are junior to equity and get extinguished in case of a bank failing. In English this means that these bonds need not pay interest and need not return capital if the bank finances are under stress. Retail investors into Yes Bank AT1 bonds lost their entire savings when they bought these bonds when they were told by the bank managers that these were FDs with a higher interest.
Mutual funds also have AT1 bonds in their debt funds, introducing risk worse than equity into products that retail investors consider safe. These risks were marked out in this story in 2016. One estimate says that there were 25 schemes by end June 2020 with between 15% to 60% of their assets in these risky bonds. That’s a lot of very high-risk bonds in a debt portfolio!
A March 10, 2021 circular issued by Sebi lays out the rules of the game so that worse than equity risk is not introduced into debt funds. The circular says:
No mutual fund will own more than 10% of these bonds issued by a single issuer across all its schemes.
Not more than 10% of a scheme to be invested in these bonds.
And not more than 5% of a scheme in the bonds of a single issuer.
If a scheme and fund house already have investments that are higher than these limits, these will be grandfathered – the fund need not sell them, but not buy more.
For retail investors this is important because Sebi is putting limits on how much of these very risky bonds a fund house can buy. And for funds that are already holding more bonds than now allowed, Sebi is giving a leeway of ‘grandfathering’ their holdings. They are not being forced to sell, but cannot buy more till they fall below the new regulatory thresholds.
A second part of the circular says that:
The tenor of the bonds will be considered as 100 years since they are, well, perpetual.
Closed end schemes will not invest in perpetual bonds, because they will not have a tenor of a 100 years
Sebi’s goal seems to be to protect investors into debt funds from finding too much risk in their portfolios. Some debt funds were found to be treating these long-term bonds as short term by taking the put and call dates as the tenor of the bond. Put and call dates are those dates on which the bank can call back these bonds and pay investors back or investors can sell these bonds back on a ‘put option’ date. See this from an investor point of view, you buy a short-term debt fund to have certainty of money and a return that is slightly higher than a bank deposit. But to include highly risky, long-tenure bonds in the portfolio of short term bonds, as Franklin Templeton did, makes investors open to risks they did not want to take. Also valuing a perpetual bond on the call/put date is a real sleight of hand and a very sharp practice by the fund houses doing this.
This action by Sebi is in continuation to its October 2020 circular that put in place rules so that retail investors cannot buy these bonds directly. A minimum ticket size of Rs 1 crore, a minimum lot size of Rs 1 crore and restricting sales to only institutional buyers were all aimed to preventing a Yes Bank like mis-selling episode. Surprisingly, action was taken by the capital market regulator to what is a banking regulator problem. RBI took the view that retail investors were disclosed the risk of these bonds by Yes Bank and were not mis-sold. This paper (I am one of the authors) marks out how better disclosure would have prevented most of these sharp sales by Yes Bank officials.
But things unraveled on 12 March 2021 when the Department of Financial Services, Ministry of Finance overruled Sebi and in a memorandum as reported in the newspapers, told Sebi to withdraw the valuation rule as it would lead to market disruption. Next, the industry body Association of Mutual Funds in India (Amfi) made a press statement standing with Sebi! Amfi, actually has no option but to do this since these issues have been debated and discussed for months before the circular was issued two days back. The issue of AT1 bonds in mutual fund portfolios and how to value them has been a subject of much discussion within Sebi and with the mutual fund advisory committee (I am a member on this committee) over the past few months.
The Ministry of Finance has done two things wrong. One, it has not seen the retail investor interest in the action of Sebi and seems to be responding to the banking lobby. Two, by undermining the regulator in this manner it is setting a precedent for others to follow by messaging Delhi directly rather than work with sector regulators. It would have been better semantics had the government resolved the issue rather than take it public in this manner. Very unfortunate for retail mutual fund investors in particular and regulatory autonomy in India in general. The finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman needs to set this right.
It is almost as if you can see the conflict: there is the desire to do the right thing by the customer, but the DNA of an institution that does not believe in consumer rights comes in the way. The insurance regulator is torn with this dichotomy, of watching its capital market counterpart take giant strides in investor protection and disclosures, wanting to do the same, but not being able to. Insurance industry insiders say that the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (Irdai) chairman is keen to bring about change in favour of the consumer but is hampered by the tight ring of bureaucracy of a PSU monopoly mindset that thrived in a supply-starved market of the 1970s of a socialist India.
Two moves that should have brought accolades need to do much more in policyholder interest, but are good announcements of a regulator beginning to think about customers rather than agents, brokers and firms. One, the idea of a standard term life cover that can be bought off the shelf with standard features and no frills. Each insurance firm from 1 January 2021 will have to launch a standard pure term (only insurance cover, no investment) cover called Saral Jeevan Beema (read the circular here: bit.ly/37I6ii8). Great move, but it is unclear why there is a ₹25 lakh upper limit for the sum assured, and then the asterisk that firms can offer more cover if they like. It seems that firms will have to offer a cover of up to ₹25 lakh and can offer a higher one if they choose to. Pure covers have a rule of thumb of 10 times your income. So, an income of ₹2.5 lakh a year will need a ₹25 lakh cover. To me it looks like a carve out for insurance firms so that they don’t really have to offer a policy to the market that is actually buying term covers—those covers are of a much higher value— ₹50 lakh or more.
The year is 1992. I am in my first job and I don’t know it yet, but as a rookie business journalist, I’m watching India’s stock market balloon and then burst in a huge (for that time) ₹3,500 crore scam. As business journalists, we documented the setting up of India’s capital market regulator in 1992 and then its fight for teeth as the first chairman struggled to get powers to make the regulator effective. Setting up a new stock exchange to break the monopoly of the old one, moving to screen-based trading from the opaque open outcry system, getting brokers under some kind of regulation to demolish the closed club in which they operated and a whole universe of changes that really shook the way capital markets worked in India.
I remember having conversations with brokers and sub-brokers and arguing that corporatization was good and that transparency, rules of the game and investor interest would actually help the market grow. The insiders always resist change and the industry deeply believed that the business would end and everybody will lose. Investors will be orphaned in the new corporate system, went the argument. We resist in investor interest, they said.
You are doing great harm to your financial well-being if you continue to fall into the trap laid down by life insurance companies, their agents and now the shareholders of these companies, under the benevolent gaze of the insurance regulator. How many of us are still buying these traps? In financial year 2018-19 (that is the latest data available), individuals bought almost 30 million new life insurance policies, pumping almost ₹1 trillion of household savings into them.
Which policies are the most harmful? Traditional plans that include with-profit money-back, whole-life, endowment policies and guaranteed plans are the worst. These make up 85% of the entire market. Ulips are not traps and are much better products but don’t do well on disclosures and flexibility as compared to mutual funds. Term cover, the best kind of life insurance that you must have, are hardly sold. They are largely self-bought as smart people figure out what to buy. They buy online, cutting out the agent.
The Securities and Exchange Board of India has become the first financial regulator to settle the debate regarding the classification of advisors and agents when it comes to financial instruments. Personal finance expert Monika Halan explains Sebi’s solution, comparing advisors to doctors, and agents to chemists. Agents are only supposed to sell products which customers seek, while advisors will make recommendations after assessing various factors related to the buyer. Meanwhile, other regulators like the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority, and the Reserve Bank of India are still lagging behind. Is it time for the government to intervene? Monika Halan is consulting editor, Mint, and author of the book ‘Let’s Talk Money’.
The crucial lines between an adviser and an agent have finally been clearly drawn in the Indian capital market. This is as crucial as drawing a distinction between a doctor and a chemist. The process that the capital market regulator began in 2013 ended in July 2020 with the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) notifying the registered investment adviser (RIA) amendments that have gone through years of debate, consultation papers and introspection. Sebi began by asking a question to the mutual fund intermediary: who are you? Are you an agent of the mutual fund or are you an adviser to the investor? The answer to this will determine in whose interest you work. The agent gets his compensation from the mutual fund in the form of a trail commission (Sebi banned front commissions in 2009) and the adviser is compensated by the investor through a fee. You can read the way the debate moved over the years here.
As you pass through a beautiful museum at an airport on the way to your flight, you would stop to admire the sculptures, the paintings, the wall art and murals that make for such compelling beauty and atmosphere. But a former Airports Authority head once stopped me midway in my appreciation of this wonder to burst the beauty bubble. When project costs are mapped closely, art is a great way to inflate costs. Who knows how to value art, he said succinctly. Then it is a matter of connecting dots to figure out what he really said. The cost of expensive infrastructure is paid by the users finally in different ways. One way is the “user development” fees, which ranges from a few hundred to a few thousand over the past years. The latest rates are here.
We know intuitively that we pay for corruption in many ways, but the cost of graft in anything linked to real estate has the potential to cost not just a few hundred rupees to those who have the capacity to afford a flight, but far more. The worst hit is the roof-over-the-head-seeking homeowner who gets priced out of the market or thrown to distant suburbs with poor amenities. The story of residential real estate can be summed up in three words: stuffed or starving. In the premium segment, there is an oversupply, and in the affordable housing segment, there is a demand overhang estimated to be about 10 million units in 2019 and a supply overhang of about 13 million units in the premium and luxury market. What people want they don’t build. What they build, people don’t want. The key to the story is the price.
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