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Sarvada research, workflows, and commentary focused on operations & best practices.
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127 published articles
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Operations & Best Practices
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August 3, 2026
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127 articles
Operations & Best Practices - August 3, 2026 - 10 min read
IRDAI's July 2026 amendment moves TPAs to perpetual registration with annual fees and lets eligible TPAs pursue equity listing. The periodic renewal that used to police TPA fitness is gone, so the buyer's due-diligence checklist has to absorb that work before the 2027 renewal cycle.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
Operations & Best Practices - July 26, 2026 - 10 min read
India's central KYC registry moves to CKYC 2.0 in August 2026, with a single customer identifier reusable across banks, insurers and mutual funds. This post walks the broker onboarding workflow end to end: where the identifier replaces document collection, where it does not, and the SOP edits to make before the rollout.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
Operations & Best Practices - July 24, 2026 - 11 min read
A broking firm arranges liability cover for everyone else and often holds its own professional indemnity at the bare regulatory minimum. That minimum is three times last year's remuneration, and it is a licence condition, not a risk assessment. What the policy covers, how claims against brokers actually arise, and why the statutory floor is dangerously low for a firm placing large risks.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
Operations & Best Practices - July 23, 2026 - 8 min read
In five days in mid-June 2026, IRDAI put out four exposure drafts, each with a comment window of about three weeks. A firm that responds to that ad hoc loses on all four. This is the standing function that lets a mid-size broker read, assess, comment on and implement regulatory change as a routine rather than a scramble.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
Operations & Best Practices - July 22, 2026 - 10 min read
Winning the account is the easy part. The transition, getting the file, verifying the open claims, understanding the declaration positions and setting the first ninety days, is where a broker-of-record change is delivered or quietly botched. A takeover playbook for the incoming broker on a commercial client.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
Operations & Best Practices - July 21, 2026 - 9 min read
A broking firm rates its clients and its insurers rate the firm, but almost nobody rates the insurers on their own service. The one relationship the broker cannot see clearly is the one that decides whether its clients get paid. A quarterly insurer service scorecard: the six dimensions to measure, a simple weighting model, and how to use it in a relationship meeting.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
Operations & Best Practices - July 21, 2026 - 9 min read
IRDAI's June 2026 intermediary-disclosure draft would make brokers earning over Rs 10 crore in commission publish related-party dealings, dividend repatriation and audited financials every year. The rule is not final, but the data assembly can start now. A workstream guide.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
Operations & Best Practices - July 20, 2026 - 10 min read
Your commission is business income, not salary, and that one fact changes your whole tax return: the ITR form you file, the expenses you can claim, why the presumptive schemes are closed to you, and why the 2 percent TDS the insurer took leaves you with an advance-tax bill. A plain-language guide for individual advisors, with the points to take to a CA.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
Operations & Best Practices - July 20, 2026 - 10 min read
When a claim is short-paid and a client says the broker should have advised differently, the case is won or lost on the file, not on memory. What a complete placement file contains: the quote comparison, the written recommendation, the client's instruction where it chose less cover, the wordings and exclusions flagged, the declinatures, and the timestamped advice trail.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
Operations & Best Practices - July 19, 2026 - 9 min read
A commercial client rarely leaves at renewal. It decides to leave months earlier, and the renewal only records a decision already made. A quarterly retention process for broking firms: the leading indicators of a defecting account, the at-risk review meeting, loss-reason coding, and why you should measure retention by revenue rather than by count.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
Operations & Best Practices - July 18, 2026 - 9 min read
The moment a motor policy expires, a two-minute renewal turns into an inspection, a wait, and a client with a reason to shop around. What the break-in inspection is, why insurers require it, the self-inspection app flow, the no-cover window nobody warns the client about, and how the 90-day NCB rule really works.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
Operations & Best Practices - July 18, 2026 - 10 min read
The cheapest new business a broking firm can write is the cover its existing clients already need and buy elsewhere or not at all. A framework for annual account plans on commercial clients: the coverage-gap matrix, a worked manufacturing example, timing to renewal and business events, and how to measure the wallet share you actually hold.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
Operations & Best Practices - July 16, 2026 - 10 min read
Persistency is the number that decides whether an advisor's book compounds or quietly drains. What the 13th and 25th month measure, why insurers watch them more closely than they watch your sales, and what to do in months 9 to 12 and 21 to 24.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
Operations & Best Practices - July 15, 2026 - 10 min read
WhatsApp is where most Indian advisors actually run their book, and almost none of them have checked which messages are servicing and which are unapproved sales material. Where the line falls, why a broadcast list is riskier than a personal message, and what to keep.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
Operations & Best Practices - July 15, 2026 - 10 min read
A point of sales person is tied to one principal at a time, yet may end up placing business with several insurers behind that principal. What that actually means, and the operational load it creates across portals, statement formats, product sets and renewal rules.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
Operations & Best Practices - July 15, 2026 - 10 min read
Non-life commission expense grew close to 19 percent in FY2024-25 against 8.5 percent premium growth, and the rulebook that will govern FY27 is still unwritten. A build for the FY27 commission budget: the expiring register as base, retention measured on commission rather than count, a weighted new-business bridge, rate and mix as separate assumptions, phasing on the real renewal calendar, and a variance report that names a cause.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
Operations & Best Practices - July 14, 2026 - 10 min read
Most individual advisors measure how many policies they sold last month, which is the one number that predicts almost nothing about next year's income. Five measurements that do, and how to compute each from your own book rather than from someone else's benchmark.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
Operations & Best Practices - July 14, 2026 - 10 min read
Twenty minutes, five lists, same order, before the first call: renewals due, claims in flight, proposals pending against the four-working-day POS-Life issuance standard, follow-ups owed, and commission gaps aged rather than totalled.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
Operations & Best Practices - July 14, 2026 - 10 min read
Commission is the workstream that quietly sinks broking system implementations: legacy extracts with no rate-table history, in-flight policies at cutover, opening receivables nobody can reconcile, and endorsement chains the new data model cannot represent. A guide to scoping, mapping, parallel running and accepting a commission migration.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
Operations & Best Practices - July 13, 2026 - 10 min read
The five-year retention in the POSP master circular attaches to training and examination records, and nothing else. What that means for KYC files, sales evidence and advertising approvals, and why the entity that will actually ask you for a document is your principal rather than IRDAI.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
Operations & Best Practices - July 13, 2026 - 10 min read
Policy PDFs arrive by email and WhatsApp and die there. The seven fields to pull out of every schedule, a naming convention that turns your phone's search box into an index, and the ninety-second test that tells you whether your filing actually works.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
Operations & Best Practices - July 13, 2026 - 10 min read
Section 64VB of the Insurance Act, 1938 means no risk attaches until premium is received, which puts broker commission downstream of a cash event the firm does not control. How entitlement fragments on instalment-paid policies, what deposit premium does to it, what happens on dishonour, and why insurer receipt and broker payout are different dates.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
Operations & Best Practices - July 12, 2026 - 10 min read
The client who bought one motor policy from you lives in a household that owns several things and depends on someone's income. Mapping what a family already holds against what it plausibly needs is a different exercise from cross-selling, and the honest version of it is bounded by what a POSP is actually permitted to place.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
Operations & Best Practices - July 12, 2026 - 10 min read
Nobody at your principal is checking whether you were paid for every policy you sold. That job is yours, and it starts with understanding that a POSP is paid under a contract of engagement rather than by the insurer directly. A line-by-line method for matching statement to book, and the five gaps that hide in the difference.
By Tarun Kumar Singh
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