Two changes are arriving at insurance brokerages at the same time, and they interact in ways that are easy to miss if you read them separately. Registration is becoming perpetual rather than renewed every three years. And from January 2027, every policy will be tagged to the individual salesperson responsible for the sale, not merely to the broking firm.
What the Amendment Actually Did
The Insurance Intermediaries (Amendment) Regulations, 2026 overhauled the framework for insurance intermediaries. The headline changes are perpetual registration replacing periodic licence renewal, mandatory tagging of each policy to the individual salesperson, and strengthened governance and disclosure norms. IRDAI extended transitional arrangements for intermediary registration until August 31, 2026. Separately, the chairman, Ajay Seth, used the brokers' association silver jubilee to make the case for the tagging proposal directly: that every policy should be traceable to the person who sold it, not merely to the bank or broking firm.
Perpetual Registration Is Not a Relaxation
It reads like one. It is not. Under triennial renewal, the renewal event was a natural checkpoint: obligations were tested at a known date, and a regulator had a routine opportunity to decline, condition or query. Perpetual registration removes that checkpoint, which means the ongoing obligations — fit and proper standards, governance, disclosures, reporting — become continuously enforceable rather than periodically tested.
The practical consequence is that non-compliance no longer expires. There is no cycle in which a problem quietly ages out because the renewal came around after it was fixed. Something that was once a three-year memory is now a permanent record, and the regulator has to find and act on it rather than wait for the file to cross its desk.
Tagging Moves the Conversation to a Named Person
This is the change with the longest shadow. Today, a mis-selling complaint typically lands on the corporate entity, is handled by a compliance function, and settles at arm's length. With the individual named on the policy, the same complaint arrives at a person with a career, a licence and a record.
That is a real shift in accountability, and for the most part a defensible one. But it is worth being honest about its limit, and the chairman's own framing acknowledges it: a register can tell you who mis-sold a policy. It cannot tell you why. Knowing the identity of the salesperson does not tell you what target, what incentive structure or what product design produced the sale. If the underlying commission economics still reward the wrong behaviour, tagging produces a better audit trail of the symptom while leaving the cause intact. Regulators know this. Expect tagging to be followed, not preceded, by scrutiny of incentive design.
The Real Project Is Data, Not Intent
Most brokerages will not fail on willingness. They will fail on records. Tagging requires clean, current salesperson identifiers mapped correctly to every policy issued, across every insurer you place business with. The corporate agent amendment regulations already make digital tagging mandatory from January.
For a mid-size brokerage running several insurer portals, a partially contractual sales force and a CRM that was never designed to be a regulatory system of record, this is an integration project with a hard deadline. The failure mode is not a refusal to comply; it is discovering in December 2026 that your identifier mapping is three years stale.
What To Do Now
Treat January 1, 2027 as a data deadline, not only a compliance one. Audit whether every individual currently selling has a live, correctly mapped identifier at every insurer you place with. Run it as a reconciliation, and expect gaps.
Re-read your errors and omissions cover with your broker. Individual-level tagging changes who is exposed and how a claim is framed, and covers written before this regime may not respond the way you assume.
Fix incentive design before the regulator does. If a salesperson's variable pay still peaks on first-year premium for a product with weak persistency, you are now creating a named, permanent record of exactly that decision. The exposure is not the mis-sale; it is the documented pattern.
Watch the disclosure direction of travel. IRDAI has been moving toward more granular revenue reporting from larger intermediaries, not less. The precise thresholds matter less than the trend: assume that what you report about how you earn will keep getting more detailed.