Business: Training - Limbering up for the road ahead.

(From Reinsurance)

Byline: Marc Jones.

With the market constantly changing and the spectre of corporate failures hanging over the industry, (re)insurance companies are making sure that they are as up to date as possible. But in the UK there is another, more pressing reason than this. There is now less than a year-and-a-half until the UK's Financial Services Authority (FSA) extends its powers over (re)insurance companies that want to operate in London.

At the moment the industry in the UK is supervised by the General Insurance Standards Council, which has laid out standards and codes of practice that it expects its members to adhere to. The new FSA rules will include the regulation of the training and competence regime for anyone who sells or manages a (re)insurance contract. They will also cover the handling of complaints and the provision of key product information to clients.

Legislation will come into effect for long-term care insurance at the end of October 2004, with the rest of the industry coming under the FSA in January 2005.

Progress report

At the moment the FSA is working on a draft version of the rules, with the first hint about what it is looking at coming with the publication of CP187, a set of proposals that provides an update on The future regulation of insurance - a progress report, published in October last year. The report sets out some of the regulation structures that will be set up, including (re)insurance specialists to supervise how companies go about training their employees, and penalties if the companies are not up to scratch.