Right To Data Portability Will Bring Transparency To Insurance Industry: Deepti Rustagi

Policybazaar’s Group Chief Compliance Officer, Deepti Rustagi believes right to data portability under The Personal Data Protection (PDP) Bill, 2019 will bring much more transparency to the insurance industry.

The Bill, which was introduced in the Lok Sabha last year, seeks to provide for protection of privacy of individuals relating to their personal data and to establish Data Protection Authority of India for the said purposes and the matters concerning the personal data of an individual.

“Data portability under the bill is the right available to an individual to ask the data fiduciary to share his personal data with the other data fiduciary without any hindrance in such a manner that the information remains usable. This is a very welcome step from the insurance perspective,” Rustagi said recently at a webinar organized by TIE Delhi Chapter on ‘Impact of the Personal Data Protection Bill on Startups.’

PERSONAL DATA PROTECTION BILL
The bill prescribes the manner in which personal data is to be collected, processed, used, disclosed, stored and transferred. Under the bill, a data fiduciary is defined as any company that determines the purpose and means of processing of the data. This would comprise the collection, storage and dissemination of personal data. So, any company which has to collect personal data of people as part of its regular business practices would be a data fiduciary.

“Today, one of the challenges that most of the industry faces is the lack of sharing of already available information from one player to another. Standardization of data sharing requirements from one insurance company to another insurance company will be in the best interest of the consumer as well as the industry,” Rustagi said.

A committee under the leadership of Retd. Justice B N Srikrishna was constituted to propose a draft statute on data protection in 2017 as there wasn’t any legislation in India for protection of citizen data. The committee submitted its report to Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister of Electronics & Information Technology, in July 2018 and the bill was then introduced in Lok Sabha in 2019. The bill is now pending before the Joint Parliament Committee for consultation.

HEALTH INSURANCE PORTABILITY: BILL & ITS BENEFITS
Rustagi also stressed on the fact that the insurance companies have to work together on data sharing requirements because not much information is available with regards to standardization.

For example, she said, "at the time of health insurance portability, sometimes, the information is not forthcoming from the existing player. So, we don’t get to know about the claims history of a person. When the individual would be asking an insurance company to share their existing data from the other insurance company, I think it would be much more beneficial for the consumer. The entire information will be available with the second insurance company and that makes it much easier for underwriting as well as at the time of claims settlement."

There are a lot of people involved in the entire insurance value chain from policy solicitation to servicing and settlement of claims. "Some of the products are very different from one insurance company to another insurance company. When we talk about sharing data requirements from the existing player to another player, there might be a scenario when that information might not be that much useful for the other player. So, we need to work upon data standardization as we move forward with regard to sharing of information from the existing player to another player," she added.

She feels the bill will have a significant impact on the insurance industry due to the large amount of sensitive personal data being processed by insurance companies. They need to have a greater level of awareness and command over their data when they share information with third parties.