Max Life enables e-mandate for premium payments

Max Life Insurance Company has enabled e-mandate process on premium payments for its customers in partnership with Billdesk, a payment gateway solutions provider. With this, Max Life becomes the first life insurer to extend the facility of e-mandate for recurring premium payment options to its customers.

Manu Lavanya, Director and Chief Operations Officer, Max Life said, “Customer Obsession remains a core value of Max Life. We have driven multiple transformational initiatives to ensure that servicing our policyholders becomes much more efficient. To this objective, we have driven digital premium payments capability as a means of customer self-service and Max Life customers can now pay their premiums digitally and securely, ensuring the safety of their digital payment assets. This capability is indeed a step in the right direction for making our interactions with customers agile, secure, and simple.”

Reserve Bank of India (RBI)in its recent circular provided that recurring transactions using debit cards, credit cards, Unified Payments Interface (UPI), or other prepaid payment instruments (PPIs), through e-mandate shall require additional factor authentication (AFA). As per the said circular, debit authentication / AFA would be required for every recurring transaction for an amount of more than Rs. 5000/-. The issuer (Billdesk), under the said circular, in addition to the above, shall send a pre-transaction notification to the customer at least 24 hours before the actual charge or debit.

This will allow Max Life customers to choose the maximum amount through e-mandate for longer tenure and have greater control over the recurring transactions. This has been done keeping in view the changing payment needs and also to balance the safety and security of such transactions with customer convenience. With this updated process of e-mandate for recurring merchant transactions, the customers can provide the registration either at the time of the payment, or later separately via AFA validation.

However, in case Max Life customers desire to set the e-mandate on the card, etc., but the card-issuing bank has not extended the facility under the said circular, then the same is notified to the customer upfront. This allows Max Life customers to proceed for payment without e-mandate registration, or, else they can return and select any other bank card for registration. The customers can also pay premiums without the said facility and other payment options are also available to them.