Insurance
What we do
The insurance sector covers issues affecting nearly 800 regulated entities - including life insurance, general insurance, reinsurance and composite firms. The sector also includes a number of friendly societies and the Lloyd's market. Since 14 January 2005, the sector's remit also includes insurance brokers operating in the wholesale market.
Purpose
Our overarching purpose is to co-ordinate the FSA's work on insurance and to provide a central point of contact for all external stakeholders.
Risk identification
The first key function of the sector team is to identify emerging insurance risks and to co-ordinate ways to mitigate these. To do this effectively, the sector team works closely with the various insurance supervisory teams to ensure that we are harnessing the considerable intelligence that relationship managers and others working on insurance pick up in their day-to-day work. Other sources of intelligence in the insurance sector include the insurance Senior Advisors (ex-industry players) and the sector team's own extensive network of contacts within the industry.
Representation
The second key responsibility of the sector team is to represent the FSA in its dealings with a wide range of external stakeholders. In this respect, the Sector Leader is very much the lead spokesperson on insurance for the FSA. However, the sector team and others within the FSA also have a role to play in developing and cementing existing relationships and in establishing and nurturing new contacts.
The range of external stakeholders for the insurance sector is extremely broad, and includes:
- trade associations (principally the Association of British Insurers, the Association of Mutual Insurers, the Association of Friendly Societies, the International Underwriters Association and the London Market Brokers Committee.)
- professional bodies (including the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries and the CII)
- analysts and rating agencies;
- international regulators and international bodies;
- the political community; and
- the media.
FSA's insurance skills and expertise.
Ensuring that insurance-facing staff in the FSA have the correct mix of skills and experience is particularly critical as we move from developing policy to implementing it. Here, the sector team monitors the needs and requirements of supervisory staff and works to ensure that, where necessary, training programmes are put in place. As part of this drive to increase our insurance-related skills and experience, we are also developing a rolling programme of external secondments.
Ensuring a coherent approach to insurance
The final area of responsibility for us is to keep under review the coherence of FSA requirements and policies as they bear on the insurance sector. Again, this is particularly important as we move from policy development to implementing the reform programme, and translate this into workable supervisory practice. We also have a role to play in terms of consistency of interpretation of the new rules and requirements.
Obtaining copies of Insurance Returns
Every year, each insurer and friendly society authorised by the FSA must send us an insurance return. The return contains audited financial information and auditors' reports that we use for supervision. From 1 July 2005, under FSA rule IPRU(INS) 9.7, any person may request an authorised insurer or friendly society to provide copies of the firm's most recent return and the two returns before that. The firm must send the copies within 30 days of the request, but may make a reasonable charge for doing so. If a firm later sends us a correction it must, within 30 days, send a free copy of the correction to everyone who was sent the original return.
This system replaces the previous arrangement, under which the FSA deposited copies of insurance returns at Companies House. The last returns held by Companies House relate to the year ending 31 December 2003.
