Brussels, 28/04/2015 (Agence Europe) - The European insurance and reinsurance industry has warned against setting excessive requirements for pre-contractual information for investors, which could turn out to be counter-productive.
“A number of EU regulations risk overloading consumers with information that provides no benefit to them when choosing insurance products”, said the organisation, which represents the interests of the insurance industry at European level. According to Insurance Europe, therefore, the European rules should lay emphasis on the quality rather than the quantity of information insurance service providers must give retail investors. “Regrettably, this is not the path that the EU is on today”, the director general of the organisation, Michaela Koller, said in a press release.
The industry points out that the number of pre-contractual information documents consumers must receive from brokers will rise from 75 to 147 with the future application of the legislative texts, such as the 'PRIIPs' package (see EUROPE 11194), the 'Solvency II' directive and the revision of the Insurance Mediation Directive 'IMD 2' (see EUROPE 11196). Insurance Europe calls on the European legislator to assess the cumulative impact of these transparency obligations and to weed out any duplications in the framework of the inter-institutional negotiations currently underway on the 'IMD2' directive. (Mathieu Bion)