Onboarding to a New Insurer as a POSP: Codes, Logins and First Policies

Most advisors approach a new insurer relationship the way they would approach a new supplier: add it, keep what you have, place business wherever it prices best. For a point of sales person that model does not exist.

A POSP is tied to one insurer or intermediary at any given point in time. Not one at a time per product line. Not one per category. One.

So the thing people call onboarding to a new insurer is, for a POSP, a change of tie. You are not adding a principal to a panel. You are leaving one engagement and entering another, and everything downstream of that (your code, your logins, your payout terms, and the servicing of the book you already placed) moves or does not move as a consequence.

The nuance that confuses the market is real but works differently than people assume. If your principal is an intermediary rather than an insurer, you can in practice place the POS products of the several insurers that intermediary is authorised to place. Treat that as market practice rather than a rule granted to you: the reach belongs to the intermediary's licence, and your tie is still to the single intermediary.

Which sets up the only strategic decision here, and it comes before any paperwork: do you tie to an insurer or to an intermediary? Tie to an insurer and you sell that insurer's POS products. Tie to an intermediary and you get its insurer set, at the cost of a payout reaching you through the intermediary's contract. Neither is better. But you pick one, and picking again later means running this sequence again.

The entry bar is deliberately low, because the channel exists to widen distribution into places a heavier licensing route never reached.

• Age: eighteen years completed.
• Education: tenth standard pass.
• Identity: the acceptable proofs named in IRDAI's master circular for the life side include PAN Card and Aadhaar Card.

That is the regulatory floor. The engaging entity adds its own screening, and that screening is what actually decides whether you are onboarded: background checks, references, sometimes a territory fit, and increasingly a check on whether you are currently tied elsewhere. Expect the last one. Because the tie is exclusive, a principal taking you on is taking responsibility for a person who must not simultaneously be somebody else's POSP.

What the low bar does not mean is a low-friction relationship. The floor is regulatory. The counterparty is commercial, and it is choosing you.

Before the examination, you complete fifteen hours of in-house training, conducted by the insurer or intermediary that is engaging you.

Read that sentence carefully, because two words in it are the ones people miss.

In-house. The training is delivered by the engaging entity itself. It is not a public course you go and buy. If a portal offers to sell you POSP training detached from any engagement, understand what is being sold: usually the portal is the intermediary, and the training is part of its onboarding. That is fine. It just means you are choosing your principal at the moment you pay, which is a bigger decision than the price suggests.

Before. The fifteen hours precede the examination. They are not a formality you can settle afterwards, and the entity has a reason to be strict about this: training and examination records must be retained for at least five years, and those records are what demonstrate the sequence was followed.

The honest read on the fifteen hours is that they are a floor, not an education. They will not teach you to place a health floater on a household with a pre-existing condition and a room-rent sub-limit. What they establish is that a named, traceable person with a code was trained by an accountable entity before being allowed near a proposal form. Treat them as the compliance event, and build product competence afterwards, on the entity's product training, on the wordings, and on your first fifty conversations.

This is where the internet will mislead you most.

The POSP examination is conducted by the insurer or the intermediary itself, against a model syllabus specified by IRDAI. Three consequences follow, and each corrects a claim you will read elsewhere.

1. It is not "the IRDAI exam." IRDAI specifies the model syllabus. It does not sit you down and administer the paper. The entity does.
2. It is not IC-38. IC-38 is the agent examination, a different and heavier route to a different licence. A POSP examination is not IC-38 under another name, and passing one is not passing the other.
3. The exam travels with the tie. Since the entity conducts it, the pass is an artifact of your engagement with that entity, not a portable qualification you carry to the next one.

That third point is the one with money attached. People assume the exam is a licence: pass once, use everywhere. The channel does not work that way. What you carry between principals is your knowledge, your book and your relationships. What you do not carry is your code.

On passing, three things must happen, and they are the first hard deadline in the sequence that runs against the entity rather than against you.

The insurer or intermediary must issue the certificate and the appointment letter within fifteen days of your passing, and must allocate a unique POS Code to you.

Hold all three, and check them:

• The certificate evidences that you completed the training and passed the examination the entity conducted.
• The appointment letter is the contract of engagement. It says who your principal is and, materially, how you are paid. Read the payout terms in it rather than the payout terms in the recruitment conversation. It is also where termination sits, the clause you will care about most on the day you want to move.
• The POS Code is the identifier that makes a policy attributable to you. Every proposal must carry the POS Code, and the insurer is responsible for recording it.

If day sixteen arrives and any of the three has not, that is a signal about operational quality worth reading. The entity slow to issue your appointment letter is the entity that will be slow to settle a payout query eight months from now.

One administrative point that pays for itself: write down the code, the date it was allocated, and the principal that allocated it, and keep that record independently of any portal login you are given. Portal access ends when the engagement ends. Your need to reconcile payouts on policies you placed under that code does not.

A live POS Code does not make you a general insurance distributor. It makes you a distributor of POS products, which is a defined and deliberately narrow set.

The governing principle is that a POSP may solicit and market only those products specifically approved by IRDAI as POS products: simple, standardised, largely pre-underwritten contracts needing minimal underwriting intervention. This restriction is the defining feature of the channel, not a footnote to it. The trade the regulator made was a fifteen-hour entry bar in exchange for a product set where an inexpert sale does the least damage.

On the life side, POS-Life products are limited to pure term insurance (with or without return of premium), non-linked non-participating endowment, immediate annuity, non-linked non-participating health, and microinsurance. Two constraints from the same master circular shape the sale: the premium paying term under a POS-Life product is always equal to the policy term, so the limited-pay structures a client may have heard about are not available to you here; and policy issuance must not exceed four working days, a service promise you can make and then hold your principal to.

On the non-life and health side, the original approved set was motor (package cover and standalone third-party or Act-only, across two-wheeler, private car and commercial vehicle), travel, personal accident, and home. That set has been expanded over time beyond the original list, and now takes in certain health and rural covers. The operative current list is the one IRDAI publishes: check IRDAI's point of sales page rather than a distributor's product page.

Products outside the POS set are outside your code. Commercial, underwritten lines are not POS products, and no volume of experience converts them into POS products. If the business you want is there, the honest route is a different licence, not a stretched reading of this one.

The first policy under a new code is worth doing slowly, because whatever you do on it you will do three hundred more times.

1. Check the code lands on the proposal. Not that you typed it. That it is on the submitted proposal. This is the field that makes the policy yours, and the first policy is your cheap chance to verify the entity's system carries it through to issuance.
2. Keep the schedule, not the confirmation message. The schedule carries the risk end date, the sum insured and the cover. A chat confirmation carries none of them reliably, and eleven months later it is the end date you need.
3. Record what you expect to be paid before you are paid. The first payout statement under a new engagement is the one to reconcile line by line, because it tells you what the appointment letter's terms mean in practice. Later statements you can sample. This one you read.
4. Log the KYC as you collected it. You are required to collect and maintain KYC documentation and product sales records and to pass them to the engaging entity truthfully and promptly. Doing that on policy one is cheaper than reconstructing it on policy one hundred.
5. Show the client nothing the entity has not approved. A POSP may not issue or publish advertisements or sales material without the prior approval of both the engaging entity and the insurer. A comparison sheet you made yourself, however accurate, is sales material.

The last one connects to the structural fact worth carrying out of this sequence: the principal, not the POSP, carries the regulatory liability. Where a life insurer engages you, the insurer is responsible for your conduct, and misconduct by you exposes the insurer to penalty under Section 102 of the Insurance Act, 1938. Where an intermediary engages you, the intermediary carries it. Your exposure is contractual, and the contract is the appointment letter handed to you on day fifteen. That is why your principal is strict about your sales material, and a good reason to read the letter.

Since the tie is exclusive, every move is an exit and an entry, and the book you built sits between them.

What moves with you: your clients' trust, your knowledge of their households, and your records, assuming you kept records rather than portal access. What does not move: your code, and the servicing of in-force policies placed under it, which keep renewing inside a relationship you have left.

A workable sequence:

1. Read the termination clause before you talk to anyone. Notice period, and whether there is anything said about in-force business and trail payouts.
2. Reconcile before you leave, not after. Any payout query open at the moment your login is switched off becomes a query you are raising as an ex-POSP, which is a materially worse position. Close the statements first.
3. Extract your book. The policy schedules, the household records, the codes, the dates. If this lives only in the principal's portal, you have discovered what your book was actually worth.
4. Exit in writing, then enter. Not the reverse, and not both at once.
5. Re-run the sequence. New engagement means the new entity's fifteen hours, the new entity's examination, a new certificate and appointment letter within fifteen days, and a new code. This is the cost of the move, and it is the reason to choose the principal well the first time rather than treating the choice as reversible.
6. Keep the old code in your records. Your book now contains policies proposed under two codes, both live, both renewing. That is a fact about your records for years, not a detail of the transition month.

The advisors who move well are the ones who never needed the portal to know what they had. That is a lesson about the client book, and the time to learn it is before you need it.