The Design Freedom the 2024 Products Regulations Unlocked
The single most consequential change in how Indian commercial insurance products are made is also one of the least exploited by buyers. The IRDAI (Insurance Products) Regulations, 2024, with the master circular on general-insurance products that operationalises them, consolidated a scatter of older product rules into one framework and pushed most commercial general-insurance products through a use-and-file procedure rather than the older file-and-use route. Under the prior regime an insurer needed IRDAI's prior approval before it could market a product, which meant queues, delay and a strong incentive to keep selling standard, pre-approved forms. The 2024 framework lets an insurer design and launch a product, and file it with the Authority in due course, with the discipline shifted inward to a mandatory product management committee accountable for design, underwriting, pricing and the product's whole life.
The regulations did more than speed things up; they actively encourage product innovation, customisation and the use of add-ons and riders to enrich a base cover. For a commercial buyer this reframes the entire conversation. The base product is now a starting point an insurer can build on, with extensions, optional covers, riders and bespoke endorsements layered to match a specific exposure, and with manuscript wording available where a standard form simply does not fit. The market is, for the first time, structurally set up to design cover around your risk rather than fit your risk into a product designed for someone else.
The opportunity is real but never automatic. An insurer designs to a brief; absent a brief it sells what it already has, and a buyer who treats the placement as a commodity purchase receives a commodity product. Capturing the design dividend means understanding your own exposure well enough to tell the insurer's product team what the cover must achieve, and engaging them as designers rather than as a quoting desk. That is the work the 2024 regulations make possible and reward.
The Building Blocks of a Tailored Cover: Add-Ons, Riders and Manuscript Wording
Tailoring under the 2024 regulations is not one move but a toolkit, and a buyer who knows the building blocks can brief an insurer's product team precisely rather than vaguely asking for "better cover". Three instruments do most of the work, and they suit different jobs.
Add-ons and optional extensions
The lightest-touch customisation is to enrich a base product with add-ons and optional extensions the insurer can attach to it. These bolt a defined slice of extra protection onto a proven base: an extension for a specific peril the base excludes, an optional cover for an exposure unique to your operations, or a buy-back of a standard restriction. Because they sit on a tested base, add-ons carry less drafting risk than wholesale manuscript wording while still moving the cover toward your risk. For many buyers the right design is a solid base product plus a considered set of add-ons rather than a bespoke policy.
Riders for optional and variable exposures
A rider is the instrument for an optional or fluctuating exposure you want to switch on, scale or remove without re-papering the whole policy. Where your risk has a component that varies year to year, or that only some of your operations carry, a rider lets the cover flex around it. The design question for a rider is its trigger and its interaction with the base cover: a rider whose wording does not mesh cleanly with the policy it sits on can create overlap or, worse, a gap exactly where the two meet.
Manuscript wording for risks nothing standard fits
Where a business runs an unusual process, a novel technology or a supply chain that sits across the boundaries of conventional product lines, no base product plus add-on will fit, and the answer is manuscript wording: a policy drafted, or substantially redrafted, for the specific risk. This is the most powerful and the most demanding option. Done well, it turns an ambiguous or excluded exposure into an explicitly insured one through purpose-built definitions, insuring clauses and endorsements. Done badly, it imports the ambiguities it was meant to remove. Manuscript wording is for the risks that genuinely warrant it, not a default.
When a standard product is the right design
Customisation is not a virtue in itself. For straightforward, well-understood risks a tried and tested standard wording is often the better design: its meaning is settled, claims handlers know it, and it carries less risk of an unintended gap created by rushed or amateur drafting. The skill is judgement about which building block a given risk needs, a plain base, a base plus add-ons, a rider, or full manuscript wording, and that judgement is exactly what a good broker brings to the design table.
Briefing the Insurer's Product Team: From Exposure to Drafted Cover
Designing cover is a commissioning exercise, and a buyer who runs it like one, with the right broker support, ends up with materially better protection than one who waits to be sold a product. The workflow has a clear shape, and it runs the opposite way round from a traditional placement.
Map the exposure before looking at any product
The foundation of designed cover is a clear picture of your own risk. Before a single product is on the table, you should be able to say what would hurt most: the loss scenarios that would threaten the business, the dependencies that would amplify a loss, and the points where your operations are most exposed. This exposure map is what lets you tell an insurer what to build, instead of reacting to whatever it happens to stock. A broker who opens with a proper risk assessment rather than a quote request is starting in the right place.
Write a design brief, not a request for quotes
From the exposure map comes a design brief: a written statement of what the cover must achieve, which perils and losses must respond, which standard restrictions must be bought back or carved away, which definitions must reflect your actual operations, and which optional exposures call for an add-on or a rider. This brief is the instruction you hand the market. It turns the conversation from "what will you sell me" into "here is what my risk needs, design it", which is exactly the conversation the 2024 regulations let insurers have.
Engage the product and underwriting team as designers
A design brief invites the insurer's product and underwriting teams to do design work: to propose the right base product, the add-ons and riders that enrich it, and any manuscript wording the risk warrants. Only the engaged buyer draws this out; a buyer who sends a bare schedule receives a bare product. The dialogue then runs on the construction of the cover, not just its premium.
Evaluate competing designs on what they build, not what they cost
When insurers respond, the comparison is between designs: what each construction actually delivers against your brief, how the add-ons and riders mesh with the base, and where each leaves a residual gap. The cheapest quote can be the worst design if its base carries a broad restriction the others bought back. Evaluating the architecture of the cover, not the headline price, is where the design dividend is won or lost.
Get the drafting right and pin it down
Designed cover lives or dies on its drafting. An add-on, a rider or a manuscript clause is only as good as the words that express it, and a loosely drafted rider can create overlap with the base or a gap where the two meet. The buyer must understand exactly what each building block does, confirm the final wording says what was designed, and keep a clear record of what is and is not covered, so the construction holds together at a claim rather than coming apart on a definition.
Where Design Freedom Runs Out, and How to Work Within It
The design freedom the 2024 regulations created is real but bounded, and a buyer who understands the boundaries briefs the insurer more effectively. The freedom belongs to the insurer, to design and file products within its own governance and the regulatory framework, and it is not a licence to write anything either party fancies. Every product still passes through the insurer's product management committee, must meet the Authority's expectations on sound design and pricing, and remains subject to supervision through filing. Pricing has to be actuarially defensible and the product sustainable, so an insurer will not design an add-on or rider it cannot rate or stand behind, however much a buyer wants it.
The design itself carries practical limits. Heavily manuscripted wording can be harder to administer at a claim if handlers are unfamiliar with it, and rushed or amateur drafting of a rider or endorsement can manufacture the very ambiguity it was meant to remove. The insurer's appetite to enrich a cover is also shaped from behind by its reinsurance: an add-on or manuscript extension has to fall within what the insurer's treaty and facultative arrangements will accept, so a buyer pushing for an unusual extension may meet not unwillingness but a risk-transfer constraint the insurer cannot move alone.
Within those limits the design dividend is substantial and badly under-claimed. The 2024 regulations shifted the Indian commercial market from one where a plain base product was the path of least resistance to one where a buyer who commissions cover can have it built around the risk. The buyers who benefit map their exposure, write a design brief, and engage the insurer's product team; the buyers who do not keep buying a base product on price and wondering why it fits imperfectly.
For brokers, the regime raises both the opportunity and the bar. A broker who can read a client's exposure, design the right combination of base, add-ons, riders and manuscript wording, and compare competing constructions on what they build delivers far more than one who shops a base product on price. Doing that well depends on knowing what wordings and extensions exist across the market, how they differ, and which insurer is willing and able to build what, which is hard to hold in one head.
This is the gap Sarvada fills: it gives commercial-insurance brokers and corporate risk teams structured, searchable access to insurer wordings and the intelligence around them, so designing a tailored cover, identifying which add-ons and extensions exist, and comparing competing constructions can be done rigorously rather than from memory. Risk teams and brokers who want to use the 2024 Products Regulations to commission cover that genuinely fits the risk can Request Access to evaluate the platform.