|
|
Insurance Europe sees — and supports — many well-intentioned regulatory initiatives, both at EU and at international level. Effective and trusted regulation is vital to ensure that policyholders can feel confident buying insurance products and that our industry can remain competitive and innovative.
Insurance Europe applauded many of the legislative achievements of the European Commission under the decade-long leadership of José Manuel Barroso. Nevertheless, they likewise applaud the stock-taking and review of the body of financial services legislation initiated by Jean-Claude Juncker’s current Commission. This is because, on many occasions, they have seen initially-sound legislative proposals become over-engineered or buried beneath an avalanche of rules and requirements that fail to serve either the insurance industry or its customers.
Insurance Europe and its members will continue to strive to ensure that insurers are treated as part of the solution to the many challenges our society faces, not as a problem. In this respect, it has been heartening to receive recognition from Christiana Figueres of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change of our industry’s role in tackling climate change. Insurance Europe’s own “target two degrees” campaign played its own small part in raising climate-change awareness ahead of the UN’s Paris Agreement in December 2015.
And finally a word of explanation about this new-look Annual Report. In a departure from previous years, we have included not only articles setting out Insurance Europe’s positions on all the major regulatory issues facing EU insurers but also opinion pieces by external authors on the insurance topics of the day. We’d like to thank those contributors for sharing their thoughts with us and we hope you enjoy reading this more rounded review of the challenges and opportunities that face the European insurance industry.