Estimating losses to customers on account of mis-selling life insurance policies in India

Abstract

This paper presents two approaches that use publicly available data to estimate the loss to investors from mis-selling of insurance products. The first approach uses the number of lapsed policies from the annual reports of the insurance regulator, IRDA, while the second method uses the persistence of premium payments that are reported in the annual reports of individual insurance companies. Both these methods arrive at a similar estimate a loss of about Rs.1.5 trillion, or $28 billion, to investors owing to mis-selling over the 2004-05 to 2011-12 period.