Phonepe get Irdai nod for brokerage bi

Bengaluru-based payments major Phonepe has been issued a direct broking licence by the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (Irdai), it said on Monday.

Phonepe entered the insurtech sector last year with a limited insurance ‘corporate agent’ licence, which restricted the company to partnering with only three insurance companies per category. With this direct broking licence, Phonepe can distribute insurance products from all insurance companies in India.

Since launching insurance on its platform in January 2020, Phonepe has brought out offerings across general, term, and health insurance on its platform.

The new broking licence will also allow Phonepe to start offering personalized product recommendations to its more than 300 million users and offer a much more diverse portfolio of insurance products for Indian consumers.

“This licence is a big milestone in our insurance journey. This move to broking will give us further momentum and accelerate our growth in this space. We are building a robust, full service platform for our deeply engaged customer base through innovative products in partnership with high qu insurers. This move will lea closer to our goal of becomi one-stop destination for al insurance needs of our cust ers,” said Gunjan Ghai, president and head of insur at Phonepe.

Last week, Phonepe announced that it has go in-principle approval from Reserve Bank of India to ope as an account aggregator (

The AA licence will pe Phonepe to launch its acc aggregator platform that enable free and ins exchange of financial between the financial infor tion users (FIUS) and finan information providers (F with consent from custom in a safe and secure manne

Phonepe has earlier launched several mutual fu and insurance products suc tax-saving funds, liquid fu international travel insur and ‘corona care’, a dedic insurance product for the id-19 pandemic for its user

The payment fintech’s st gic entry into the financial s ces segment, is to diversif revenue pool as the paym segment is a loss making b ness. This comes at a time w merchant discount rate transaction fees continue t zero, after the Indian gov ment decided in 2019 to w the fee for digital transact powered by the Unified ments Interface and Rupay