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UNI Europa Finance has answered the EIOPA consultation on good supervisory practices regarding knowledge and ability requirements for distributors of insurance products, and supports the aim of developing good supervisory practices in this field to prevent regulatory arbitrage.



Currently insurance undertakings and their staff meet knowledge and ability requirements in a variety of different ways, such as under national labour law. Harmonisation is important to ensure that there is a level playing field in place, however efficient national structures should not be undermined by any new EU-level standards.



UNI Europa Finance has proposed amendments to IMD II and MiFID II. These stress the need to ensure that a sufficient level of qualifications must be ensured for staff providing insurance policies and that continuous training and competence development must be the responsibility of the company and not the individual employee. Some caution is needed regarding e-learning as this may discourage insurance undertakings to carry out their duty to provide training.



Training is also linked to the question of sanctions. An employee should never have to face sanctions for having followed internal rules.



There is a need for harmonisation of the principles proposed in the EIOPA draft report with other fields of the financial industry since insurance products can be sold by employees also covered by MiFID. Educational requirements need to be product centred, proportionate to the role of the insurance intermediary and identifying who the customer is. It is therefore important that this work is coordinated across the European Supervisory Authorities.



What competent authorities can require a distributor to demonstrate should be seen as good practice rather than explicit demands and it should be avoided that all the responsibility is put on the client relations officer. When defining behavioural aspects, judgement and performance measurements may become arbitrary.



Overall, clarifying and strengthening knowledge and ability requirements will ensure that the employees feel more secure in a sales and advice situation, which also improves health and safety in the workplace.