A working group of the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) has called for the need to reintroduce index-linked insurance products. This comes at a time when the investment markets are volatile, resulting in customers preferring guaranteed returns. This, in turn, has increased the balance sheet risk of insurers. Hence, the working group is of the opinion that the index-linked insurance products can be an appropriate alternative or complimentary option to the current conventional guaranteed products and unit-linked policies. The regulator had prevented insurance firms from selling these products in 2013. Prior…

Major cryptocurrency exchanges experienced technical issues on Monday as trading volumes soared after billionaire Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc revealed it had purchased $1.5 billion of bitcoin and would soon accept it as a form of payment. The electric-vehicle company’s move marked the latest step toward mainstream acceptance of bitcoin, sending it 10{bce2ac57dae147ae13b811f47f24d80c66c6ab504b39dda4a9b6e8ac93725942} higher on expectations that other companies will soon join asset manager BlackRock Inc and payments companies Square and PayPal in backing the cryptocurrency. San Francisco-based cryptocurrency exchange Kraken said it had re-enabled sign-ups after temporarily disabling them earlier in the day because…

January 26, 2021 4 min read What’s a Super Bowl without the commercials? We won’t find out in 2021, but major brands like Coca-Cola, Ford and Budweiser will sit out this year’s Big Game.  “With Super Bowl parties either scaled way down or just canceled, it probably makes sense to sit this one out at this cost” for certain marketing categories, Brian Sheehan, a professor of advertising at Syracuse University’s SI Newhouse School of Public Communications, told Variety. Related: Every Day in Business Should Be Treated Like Super Bowl Sunday A 30-second spot in Super Bowl LV costs advertisers $5.5…

Continuing the selling spree for the eighth consecutive month, mutual funds pulled out Rs 12,980 crore from equities in January as surge in markets provided an opportunity to book profits. MyWealthGrowth.com co-founder Harshad Chetanwala said investors may prefer to book profits for some more time as they witness more surge in the stock market. However, with growth-focused Budget, improving economy and vaccination drive, the equities are one of the best asset classes to remain invested at present, he added. Overall, mutual funds withdrew a net of over Rs 56,400…

January 21, 2021 6 min readOpinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Amazon was founded in 1995 in Jeff Bezos’s garage. Initially, it was just a company providing services as an online bookstore. Over the years, the business that started as a mere bookstore turned into a multinational company, started selling almost everything, and eventually became the biggest name in the entire ecommerce industry.  But how did Amazon go from zero to hero? Well, there’s certainly no single answer – it’s a blend of innovation, vision, hard work, and in-depth marketing. No matter if you’re just starting out…

Even as the demand for health insurance in the country peaked due the ongoing pandemic, data from insurance aggregator Policybazaar.com suggests that purchase of health policies by the senior citizen category was lower than in other age categories. According to data shared by Policybazaar.com to Business Standard, the share of policies bought by the senior citizen category in the age-group 60-80 years stands at only 15 per cent, whereas the share for the younger lot in the age bracket of 18-40 years was found to be 45 per cent. This is despite the old people being…

Bitcoin climbed toward $40,000 in a rally that helped the market value of digital tokens scale a new peak. The largest cryptocurrency rose as much as 5.6{bce2ac57dae147ae13b811f47f24d80c66c6ab504b39dda4a9b6e8ac93725942} to $39,959 on Saturday, taking it closer to early January’s all-time high of almost $42,000. The value of more than 6,000 tokens tracked by CoinGecko hit about $1.23 trillion. The jump comes after another volatile week in cryptocurrencies marked by Elon Musk’s support for Bitcoin and a record runup in Ether, the second-largest token. Billionaire Musk also posted tongue-in-cheek tweets about Dogecoin — a Shiba Inu-themed unit…

February 5, 2021 7 min readOpinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own. Mainstream media has continued to shrink — in fact, this recent Pew Research report shows newsroom employment in the United States declined by 23{bce2ac57dae147ae13b811f47f24d80c66c6ab504b39dda4a9b6e8ac93725942} between 2008 and 2019. The smaller size of newsrooms, paired with the fact that the technology press continues to favor only the biggest companies, means many organizations are searching for fresh ways to uplevel their profiles. One way to break through the barriers to coverage today: create your own newsroom that lives on your website and covers topics of interest to influencers,…