Max Life becomes first life insurance player to join account aggregator system

Max Life Insurance Co. Ltd on Thursday said it has joined the account aggregator (AA) framework introduced by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) in September. Max Life is the first life insurer to do so.

Max Life has collaborated with non-banking finance company (NBFC) FinVu, which is also an AA, and Finarkein, a data analytics company, to join the network as a Financial Information User (FIU). The insurer said it has joined the AA ecosystem to access customer’s financial information in a seamless and secure manner, which, in turn, will help reduce timelines for policy issuance.

“Our partnership with FinVu and Finarkein is a step towards bringing greater flexibility, scalability, and security to customer financial data management, and at the same time, aids in the provision of an agile and frictionless underwriting experience,” said Manu Lavanya, director and chief operations officer, Max Life.

The AA framework is designed to enable customers to securely share their financial data to financial institutions they want to take services from. A customer’s data cannot be shared with any entity without the former’s consent.

In the first phase, Max Life will run a pilot project with a select group of customers to examine the agility of data flow, technological requirements and embracement of the AA ecosystem by the customer, among other things. “Based on the result of the first phase, Max Life will release the commercial scale-up plan in the next fiscal, followed by the commercial roll-out,” the insurer said in its official statement.

The partner fintech companies FinVu and Finarkein will assist Max Life in building streamlined data flow journeys and tech architecture to consume data through the AA framework, the insurer said. “Finarkein will leverage its machine learning capabilities to create a model that provides insightful summaries on the customer’s financial health,” it added.