In 2019, the All-Russian Union of Insurers and insurance community outlined several directions for the life insurance market development. The first is infrastructure improvement, making sales and payments better, more comfortable for the consumer. In order to do that, we worked on changing the AML/CFT legislation, which had been quite conservative for life insurers. We moved this large stone which for decades had been in our way, we managed to achieve the simplified customer identification for accident and health insurance. It was the first step, they believed in us by giving simplified identification on one type. For 2020 we are setting the goal to move further by achieving similar opportunities for other insurance types.
The next step is the opportunity to delegate identification to credit organizations and possibility of intra-group identification. It is very important for insurers because it will simplify sales with more time devoted to the product and not papers. Customers will not have to provide the amount of documents necessary for a full identification; it will be easier for them to purchase insurance products.
Another important achievement is giving life insurers the access to information exchange with Civil Registry Offices (on death, death causes, etc.). This is already legally fixed, and logging on to databases is in process. It will allow make payments much faster in difficult life situations.
We have not yet been able to access medical organizations’ data. Unfortunately, there still are opponents of legislative changes that allow insurers to access medical information. This could help make payments even more comfortable for the consumer, faster and simpler from the point of view of their administration, more precisely at those moments when they are really needed by a person.
The next area is related to financial stability. Life insurance companies are probably one of the most sustainable financial institutions, as we have a very conservative reservation policy. Despite that, another regulatory element was applied to us: the charter capital was increased by the Central Bank requirement. Insurers have gone through this stage quite easily, but now the next increase is being planned.
An important moment for us in 2019 was the development of super services as part of the digital development, modernization and transformation of our economy. Life insurers appeared in these super services as full participants for the first time. It is clear that the super-services are still being developed, but the fact that we are included in the plan suggests that we are close to making our interaction with the client as digital as possible. For example, life insurers are listed as a necessary participant in information exchange in the super-service project “Losing a closed one”.
We have been talking about standards almost all year of 2019. Four standards regulating information and sales disclosure were developed for life insurance, as a result. We have successfully implemented these standards despite the understanding that they are redundant. We are pro raising customer awareness, but such a number of standards rather lead to an excess of information in a situation where you need to convey the product essence of the product to the person. A person does not want to read a large number of documents; he wants to understand what it is by one page. Nevertheless, we have implemented it and showed that we are ready for any forms of interaction in order to be transparent, both for our client and regulator.
Source: http://www.insur-info.ru/comments/1374/
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