Egypt: Individual insurance brokers allowed to undertake online distribution
Source: Middle East Insurance Review | Feb 2019
The Financial Regulatory Authority (FRA) is allowing individual insurance brokers to participate in the electronic marketing and distribution system of common classes of insurance. The move places them on par with brokerage companies.
The e-distribution and issuance system is for travel, short-term life, personal accident and compulsory motor third-party liability insurance.
The FRA move takes place two years after the regulator allowed brokerage companies to carry out e-marketing, reported Al Mal News.
Several individual brokers said the decision will contribute to increasing the rates of growth in property insurance, as well as lift the returns to be received by intermediaries.
Mr Mohammed Al-Ghatraifi, an individual insurance broker, said individual brokers have extensive experience in compulsory insurance and travel insurance and are able to provide IT system for e-distribution of insurance policies. They also have a young team of university graduates and trainers in modern technology.
In addition, individual brokers will benefit from the decision in other ways as e-insurance will contribute to eliminating the problems faced in manual issuance of compulsory motor insurance policies, such as falsified documents and other types of fraud such as under-reporting premiums to insurers, he said.
Another individual broker, Mr Hamdi Abdul Mawla, forecasts that personal accident business will expand by 20% after the implementation of the FRA decision.
Individual brokers have been operating in the Egyptian market longer than corporate brokers, who were allowed to be established under a law enacted in 2008. According to the latest official statistics, the number of individual brokers in the insurance market at the end of March last year stood at nearly 10,000. M