The Insurance Regulatory & Development Authority (IRDA) is likely to permit banks to sell insurance products of more than one service provider.

An IRDA official said that IRDA was looking into bancassurance and giving final touches to its report.

IRDA had allowed bancassurance from 2002. According to the norms, a bank was only allowed to act as an agent for one life and one general insurer. Bancassurance is a delivery channel in which insurance company sell their products through a bank's sales channel.

Currently, bancassurance constitutes over 25 percent of the entire premium collected by the insurance industry.

Nine life insurance companies and three general insurance companies are being promoted by banks out of the total 23 and 21 respectively.

India has approximately 1,70,000 bank branches. In the last financial year, private insurers had just paid above Rs. 200 crore as commission for bancassurance, the non-life insurers paid more.

Banks expect that once they are permitted to sell products of multiple insurers this commission will increase substantially.