An insurance advisory platform is a service that recommends a health or term life insurance policy for your situation and explains its fine print, usually over a call or a chat. Its advisers are trained to explain policies. The platform says that it does not push the policy that pays it the highest commission. In India, such a platform must be registered with IRDAI, the insurance regulator, usually as an insurance broker or a corporate agent.
Health and life policies are hard to compare. Two health policies with the same cover of ₹10 lakh can pay very different amounts for the same hospital stay. The difference lies in the fine print. A room-rent limit caps the cost of the hospital room you may choose. A waiting period is the time before an illness you already have is covered. Co-payment is the share of every bill that you must pay yourself.
Consider a couple in Bengaluru with a two-year-old child, who want health cover for the family. They book a 30-minute call. The adviser asks about their ages, their health, their budget and the hospitals near their home. She recommends two family policies. Both have no room-rent limit, and both cover the wife's asthma after a three-year waiting period. She also points out a popular policy that they should avoid, because it has a 20 per cent co-payment. The couple choose one of the two. The adviser helps them fill in the application, and the insurer's insurance core system issues the policy. If they make a claim later, the platform can help them with the paperwork.
Advice matters because insurance was long sold to people rather than bought by them, as the page on insurance distribution explains. Advice is also regulated. The question of when an explanation becomes advice, and who may give advice, is discussed on the page on investment advice regulation. Some platforms now also use large language models, which can read a policy's fine print and answer simple questions, alongside their human advisers.
An advisory platform differs from an insurance comparison marketplace. A marketplace shows you a long list of policies and lets you choose. An advisory platform shortlists one or two policies and explains why they suit you.