Feb 2017
Issue No.242
Change of Office Bearers
Mr Stuart Harrison has been
elected Deput y Chair man of HKFI following the retirement of Mr Stuar t Fraser. And the latter’s position in the Governing Committee has been taken up by Ms Charity Au.
At the same time, Mr K H Wong has resigned from the General Insurance Council (GIC) after serving the Council for close to two decades. A sincere vote of thanks to both Mr Fraser and Mr Wong for their valuable services over the past years. We wish them all the best. Given that the current term will be ending in two months’ time, both GIC and Life Insurance Council (LIC) have decided not to run a by-election.
New IARB Chairman
I am ple as e d to announc e
that Mr Robert Y H Pang, SC, has been appointed by the Federation as the new Chairman of the Insurance Agents Registration Board (IARB) for a term of two years commencing 20 February 2017. Mr Pang has been a member of the IARB since July 2010. He has been in full practice at the Hong Kong Bar since 1989 and was appointed Senior Counsel in 2012. He is now the ViceChairman of the Hong Kong Bar Association. I am sure that under Mr Pang’s leadership, the IARB will carry on its distinguished work of perfecting industry’s best practices and protecting the interests of consumers. Taking this opportunity, I would like to thank Mr Ambrose Cheung, BBS, MH, JP, the immediate past Chairman of the IARB, for his tremendous contributions to the insurance industry for the past 12 years. Please join me in wishing him good health and all the best in future endeavours.
The Task Force on Health Care Reform met the Food and Health Bureau’s (FHB) on 16 February 2017 to discuss the outstanding issues and implementation details of the VHIS.
Our discussion focused on how to strike a proper balance between commercial viability and reasonable regulation. We expressed concerns over the potentially complicated product approval process and excessively prescriptive rules and guidelines and how these could adversely affect the take-up rate from both insurers and consumers. The FHB is now appointing consultants for three studies on standardisation of policy, drafting of guidelines for insurers and benchmarking pricing and benefit levels. The HKFI will continue to provide input to these studies and seek views from member insurers as appropriate.
Independent Insurance Authority (IIA)
The IIA has released the first draft of the guidelines on
the collection of levy which sets out the rates, cap, billing, remittance, reporting and penalties with illustrative examples. A Members’ consultation was conducted in the past two weeks and substantive comments, questions and concerns were received. The Secretariat is now consolidating these comments and will follow up closely with the IIA and Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau. We aim to resolve the outstanding issues in time for smooth implementation of the proposed system by 1 January 2018. On 28 February 2017 we had an informal exchange with the IIA Governing Board and found our discussion most constructive. We covered a raft of issues relating to the setting up of the IIA, transitional arrangements and ascertained the stance of the IIA in certain areas, e.g. the centralised insurance claims database, the Holistic Consumer Protection Mechanism, FinTech / InsurTech, e-CPD, ethics management training, Risk Based Capital, etc.