CEIOPS to agree advice on broker directive next week

The advice will contain CEIOPS’ thinking on key issues such as how insurance brokers should be paid and levels of transparency to help tackle ongoing concerns about potential conflicts of interest that can emerge when brokers take payment from both customers and insurers. The European Commission asked CEIOPS to provide the advice this summer and it was thought that the process had been delayed by the mountain of work created for the supervisory body by Solvency II, Europe’s planned new capital adequacy regime, that is currently within a critical stage. But a CEIOPS spokesman told Commercial Risk Europe that the report had not been delayed ‘as such’. “The target of summer 2010 was an indicative timetable originally provided by the Commission. Our work has taken longer than anticipated due to the complexity of the issues we were asked to address by the Commission and the fact that we were asked to consider some additional matters which were not contained in the original Request for Advice,” explained David Cowan, speaking on behalf of Carlos Montalvo Rebuelta, Secretary General of the CEIOPS Secretariat in Frankfurt, Germany.hide"We are currently in the process of finalising our draft Advice to the Commission and aim to approve it at our Members Meeting on 10 November 2010. Assuming the draft Advice is approved by our members, it will then be formally transmitted to the Commission straight afterwards. A decision will also be made at the Members Meeting about external publication of the Advice. Should external publication also be approved, this will take place shortly after 10 November 2010,” he explained further. Karel van Hulle, Head of Unit, Insurance and Pensions, Financial Institutions, Internal Market Directorate General at the European Commission, and the architect of Solvency II, told Commercial Risk Europe that, despite the delay, the revision of the Insurance Mediation Directive is still on track. “It is true that the advice from CEIOPS on the revision of the IMD is more likely to arrive at the end of November. The issues we asked them to consider are not easy and there are different views which may not be easy to reconcile. But this should not affect our timing,” he said in an interview that will be published in full in the coming November issue of CRE. Mr Van Hulle said that the Commission plans to publish a final proposal on the revision of the Directive in December 2011. A public hearing on the revision of the IMD will be held in Brussels on 10 December. Mr Van Hulle confirmed that CEIOPS will have delivered its work by then and added that the Commission will also publish a consultation document in November. “Both the CEIOPS document and our consultation document will be on the table for the public hearing,” he said. The public hearing will take place at the Albert Borschette Conference Centre in Brussels and participation is free of charge. Applications to attend need to be filed by November 30. FERMA has been working on a protocol with BIPAR, the European brokers’ association, to try and agree a set of guidelines for the commercial insurance market as both corporate buyers and brokers are keen to avoid being sucked into a new rulebook that is mainly designed for the retail insurance and pensions market. It is thought that FERMA is keen to have the protocol agreed in time for the public hearing. Nic De Maesschalck, Director of BIPAR, recently told CRE that he hopes the protocol will be agreed by the end of the year.

CEIOPS to agree advice on broker directive next week

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