Bima Sugam

Imagine a single national marketplace app where a customer could compare, buy, renew, claim against, or transfer any insurance policy from any insurer in the country, all through one shared, standardised digital interface, rather than needing a separate relationship, app or agent for each individual insurance company. Bima Sugam is IRDAI's attempt to build exactly this.

Bima Sugam is envisioned as a national digital insurance marketplace, an open platform where insurers, agents, brokers and customers can all transact, insurance shopping, purchase, claims and servicing across every participating insurer's products in one shared digital layer, rather than each insurer maintaining its own separate, siloed customer experience.

The first phase went live in December 2025, beginning with e-KYC capabilities and a select set of insurance products, a deliberately staged rollout rather than launching the full, ambitious version of the platform all at once, reflecting how genuinely complex it is to get competing insurers to operate on shared, standardised digital infrastructure together.

The ambition draws an obvious, deliberate parallel to India's earlier successes building shared public digital infrastructure, UPI for payments and the account aggregator framework for financial data being the clearest precedents, betting that a similar open, standardised approach can meaningfully increase India's still-low insurance penetration by making insurance genuinely as easy to shop for and buy as a UPI payment.

Whenever India's insurance penetration, still below the global average despite a large and growing market, is discussed as a problem distribution and accessibility could help solve, Bima Sugam is the specific infrastructure project regulators are betting on to make that structural improvement happen, still in its early, first-phase days as of its December 2025 launch.