CEA position on the revised draft Block Exemption Regulation
30 November 2009
The CEA, like the whole European insurance industry, has long supported the renewal of all four categories of cooperation that are currently covered by the insurance BER. It therefore welcomes the European Commission’s support for its renewal for joint compilations, tables and studies and for insurance pools.
The CEA, however, strongly opposes the Commission’s proposal not to renew the sections of the BER covering standard policy conditions (SPCs) and cooperation on the establishment, recognition and distribution of technical specifications concerning security devices, as we also consider these categories of cooperation to be of high importance and specific to the insurance industry.
When making its decision, the Commission does not take into account that SPCs contribute to define the insurance guarantee, ie the risk coverage, and are thus specific to insurance. They form the basis for statistics and calculations and are therefore vital to our sector. The use of SPCs helps to create transparency in the insurance market by developing the comparability of products to customers’ benefit. The CEA stresses that there is a significant risk of noncooperation in this field if the exemption is not renewed.
Cooperation on the development of specifications regarding the installation and maintenance of security devices allows insurers to better evaluate the risks they cover. The development of these high quality standards promotes risk prevention and security to the benefit of consumers. Not renewing this exemption would have the adverse effect of reducing the level of safety standards.
Should the Commission decide not to renew these exemptions, the CEA is against replacing them with guidelines.
Guidelines would be another layer of requirements to abide by and they are not legally binding nor do they offer sufficient legal certainty.
The CEA also has serious concerns about some of the amendments proposed by the Commission to the conditions of the renewed exemptions. The Commission’s proposal to oblige insurers to disclose the results of joint compilations to third parties upon request could have the unintended consequence of misinforming consumers, since wrong conclusions could potentially be drawn by third parties who do not have the technical knowledge to understand and interpret such compilations correctly.
Moreover, from a competition point of view, it is unfair to oblige insurance associations to grant any parties access to their aggregated data, whilst their competitors such as banks (life insurance; savings) and pension funds (pension products) and governmental organisations (disability and health insurance) would be able to keep their own industry data confidential and not accessible to insurers.
The CEA has strong concerns that the level of cooperation will diminish as a result of the new disclosure requirement to third parties. As a result, the joint statistics, tables and studies produced would be based on smaller quantity of data, losing their quality and accuracy. This would go against recital 13 of the draft BER which advocates for reliability of joint compilations, tables and studies.
On pools, the CEA points out that the suggested change to the calculation of the market share would make the proposed exemption unworkable as it de facto drives out insurers with a medium or large market share from pools benefiting from the BER.
Therefore, the CEA calls for renewal of all four categories of agreements currently exempted by the BER and for appropriate and workable conditions placed by the Commission on the categories it proposes to renew.
Finally, should the Commission decide not to renew one of the current exemptions or redraft the current conditions, a transitional period is necessary to enable insurers to obtain legal advice with respect to the amended BER. Such a transitional period should last at least a year starting from the expiration date of the current BER.
© CEA - Comité Européen des Assurances
