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Policybazaar: Caught in the IRDAI Crossfire?

On 23 September the IRDAI published an 80-page consultation paper on how insurance gets sold.

The next day Policybazaar lost about ₹31,000 crore on the market. Almost nothing in those eighty pages says the business is bad. What it does say is that prior reforms have not achieved their objectives for the wider industry.

We agree, but we also believe that Policybazaar will survive this storm - question is what it'll have to become to do so?

HDFC Bank: foreign investors sold 48 crore shares in one quarter. Domestic funds bought four-fifths of them.

The sell-down is real. So is the bid that met it. Foreign portfolio holding has now fallen for four consecutive quarters, to 41.83% in June 2026.

In the March quarter, when the stock fell 26.2%, domestic mutual funds absorbed about four-fifths of what foreign investors sold. That is a rotation of the shareholder base, not a uniform reduction in ownership — and it has continued through a chairman’s resignation, a board penalty on the chief executive, and the start of a search for his successor.