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Information Center > Press Releases > Latest edition of Conduct In Focus reveals improvement in CPD compliance and examines “treating customers fairly” principle

Latest edition of Conduct In Focus reveals improvement in CPD compliance and examines “treating customers fairly” principle

20 December 2023

The Insurance Authority (IA) published its latest issue of Conduct In Focus today (20 December 2023) presenting statistics on complaints received in the first three quarters of 2023, providing insurance practitioners with guidance on regulatory matters and highlighting topical issues for policy holders.

Continuing Professional Development (CPD)

Completing a minimum number of CPD hours each year is a basic obligation of every licensed individual insurance intermediary in serving to keep their knowledge and expertise up to date. Following the poor 90% CPD compliance rate across the insurance market in 2021/22, one year ago the IA published its first “CPD Non-Compliance League Table” 1 to promote better compliance.

In our Practice section, we detail how insurers and other principals have responded to this by seeking to improve the CPD compliance rate across their appointed insurance intermediaries. Twelve months on, the highlights are as follows -

  • The CPD compliance rate for the 2022/23 year has improved from 90% to 96.1%.
  • Most of the non-compliant 3.9% is made up of individuals whose licensed status makes them unable to carry on regulated activities. Discounting these individuals, the substantive compliance rate is 99.7%.
  • Every principal named on last year’s league table has, this year, achieved perfection in the form of 100% CPD compliance across their appointed insurance intermediaries.

Given the success of the “CPD Non-Compliance League Table” last year, we publish the table again this year to continue to encourage CPD compliance and to make these (and even higher) compliance rates the new normal for the Hong Kong insurance market.

Treating customers fairly

We also examine the “treating customers fairly” principle in the insurance regulatory framework and how we take account of it in our conduct supervision work. In particular, we examine the principle in the context of an insurer’s corporate culture, product development, claims handling and design of its commission structures.

“Maturity” of the insurance market

We also present the latest age statistics for individual licensed insurance intermediaries and pose the question of whether Hong Kong has a mature insurance market (in more than one way).

Ends

Note:

1 The first “CPD Non-Compliance League Table” was published in the sixth issue of Conduct in Focus (December 2022) , listing out top 10 principals with the highest percentage of CPD non-compliances across their appointed individual licensees for the Assessment Period 2021/22.