Brussels blueprint is silent on disclosure

The European Commission has held off from forcing brokers to disclose commissions in its long-awaited blueprint for shaking up the regulation of insurance intermediaries.

A consultation document on the update of the Insurance Mediation Directive (IMD), published at the end of last month, backs greater transparency on the way insurance intermediaries are remunerated. But the paper gives no concrete proposals on how this could be done.

Insurance Times revealed earlier this year that the Commission was exploring mandatory disclosure for commissions across the EU as part of its update of the IMD.

Biba head of compliance and training Steve White said UK brokers could “take some comfort” from the paper’s silence on the disclosure issue.

The paper also includes proposals to extend the IMD to direct writers so that they are on a level playing field with intermediaries in terms of the amount of information and protection they must provide. An ABI spokesman criticised the move. “The FSA carried out an independent assessment of this and they found that it added no discernible consumer benefit,” he said.