Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India notifies five regulatory updates expanding the sandbox and tightening information governance

The Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) has notified five regulations and amendments to further strengthen its principle-based regulatory framework for the insurance sector, spanning the regulatory sandbox, record-keeping and information-sharing requirements, and rules governing key meetings. The updated Regulatory Sandbox Regulations broaden the sandbox scope to encourage proposals that foster innovation, improve efficiency and ease of doing business, and introduce an enabling provision for inter-regulatory sandbox proposals across more than one financial sector. IRDAI also issued the IRDAI (Maintenance of Information by the Regulated Entities and Sharing of Information by the Authority) Regulations, 2025, consolidating three earlier regulations and requiring electronic record-keeping with robust security and privacy measures, a data governance framework, and Board-approved record maintenance policies, alongside guidelines for sharing confidential information and a requirement for data to be held in data centres located and maintained in India only. Separately, amendments were notified to the IRDAI (Meetings) Regulations and to the Insurance Advisory Committee and Re-Insurance Advisory Committee regulations to enhance operational flexibility, governance and efficiency in the conduct of meetings. For the sandbox, IRDAI indicated that operational aspects will be issued separately through a master circular.