Covered takes a closer look at the measures being enforced by CICA, and what this means for you, your customers, and the industry.
2021 is emerging to be a positive year for legislation changes, especially when it comes to the interests of consumers.
Following the commencement of the Consumer Insurance Contracts Act 2019 (CICA) in September 2020, we have been in discussions with Inse-Com regarding the second phase of regulation changes. Although deferred until 1st September 2021, the second part of the Act has outlined the requirements in which insurance firms in the Republic of Ireland will need to comply with when entering into contracts with consumers. These include:
- The abolishment of the duty of good faith. The consumer is now only required to answer the questions explicitly asked by the insurer. Removing the onus on the consumer to furnish the insurer with any additional information of relevance.
- The insurer must now provide up to 5 years of premiums paid and claims payments made at renewal invitation stage to the consumer.
These changes are a positive step for the consumer in terms of a claim being raised and shifts the apparent imbalance in insurance law in favour of consumers. We have recently received the Inse-Com CICA requirements, which will inevitably change the data capture and quoting process within your Open GI platform, as highlighted below:
- To address the pivot in asking explicit questions, an amendment to our supported risk questionnaire and help text will be required. This will enable the consumer to be asked specific and direct questions to remove any ambiguity.
- All questions will need to be mandatory and there can be no implied software house defaults.
- Outgoing EDI messages will be required to support additional post quote responses requested by specific insurer partners.
- Incoming EDI messages will be required to support the supplementary data of premiums and claims paid for the given period.
- The creation of a Statement of Fact document to accompany existing insurer Point Of Quote and Point Of Sale documentation will be required to display the data that has been captured during the quotation process.
These requirements are being reviewed and are scheduled for delivery in line with the 1st September 2021 deadline.
