You can soon store your insurance policy documents in Digilocker

Soon, policyholders will be able to use the government's DigiLocker to store their insurance policy documents. The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI), in a circular dated February 9, 2021, said, "In order to promote the adoption of Digilocker in the insurance sector, the Authority advises all insurers to enable their IT systems to interact with Digilocker facility to enable policyholders to use digilocker for preserving all their policy documents."

The insurance regulator added that insurers should inform their retail policyholders about Digilocker and how to use it. Insurers are also advised to enable the process by which the policyholders can place their policies in the Digilocker. "Digilocker team in NeGD (National e-Governance Division) under Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology shall provide necessary technical guidance and logistic support to facilitate adoption of Digilocker," IRDAI stated.

What is Digilocker?

DigiLocker is a cloud based document storage system of the Government of India. Using this facility, one can store important documents such as PAN cards, marksheets, insurance policies, certificates, driving license, etc. in an electronic format. These documents can be accessed by the user or any government verifying authority as if these were physical documents submitted by the user.

To register on the DigiLocker, all one needs is to have is a mobile number. One can also register using Aadhaar number which is linked to the user's mobile number.

Each citizen can avail a cloud space of up to 1 GB for storing their documents on DigiLocker.

Benefits of DigiLocker according to IRDAI
According to IRDAI's circular:
In the insurance sector, Digilocker will drive reduction in costs, elimination of customer complaints relating to non-delivery of policy copy, improved turnaround time of insurance services, faster claims processing and settlement, reduction in disputes, reduction in fraud and improvement in customer contactability. On the whole it is expected that it will lead to better customer experience.