OREANDA-NEWS. December 24, 2010. Ingosstrakh was among the partners of the conference “Insurance Broker as the key player of the insurance market” organized by the Association of Professional Insurance Brokers and took place in Moscow.

The participants of the event included A.P. Koval - the Head of the Federal Service for Insurance Supervision, V. Balakireva - Deputy Director of the Financial Policy Department of the Ministry of Finance of the Russian Federation, Yu.E. Bondareva -  Head of the Head of the Department for Control over Financial Markets of the Federal Antimonopoly Service, I. Alekhina-  President of the National Insurance Guild, representatives of insurance companies, insurance brokers, professional associations, market experts and journalists.

The participants of the conference discussed such issues as the current situation in the insurance market; development of agency business; improvement in supervision of insurance brokers; legislative initiatives in insurance; anti-monopoly insurance related to insurance; education and staff training in insurance; foreign experience in regulation of insurance agency business and the necessity to use it in Russia; social importance of insurance; forms of providing financial guarantees of brokerage; insurance-related taxation issues.

The Deputy Director General of Ingosstrakh, Nikolay Galushin, made a report on “The Institute of Professional Insurance Agents: Expectations of Insurers”. Specifically, he noted that insurance brokers provide a systemic sales channel; increasing sales via this channel is one of Ingosstrakh’s top priorities. For this purpose, the insurer establishes a special broker department to improve interaction and defuse possible tensions in the cooperation of the broker and the company. Today insurance companies are most interested in those broker competencies which enable significant expansion of the customer portfolio. The priorities in choosing a partner are professional staff, a fair and open attitude towards the partners, completeness of the information provided, interest in long-term cooperation, ability to generate new business and achieve synergy etc.

According to N. Galushin, the market of insurance agents today faces a number of challenges such as low level of professionalism both among insurants and insurers and brokers; indeterminate functions of brokers; lack of loyalty to each another; a common practice of non-performance of obligations after entering into transactions. To resolve these issues, we need to develop standards of conduct for insurance agents, a code of conduct, and form our own approaches to assessment (rating) of brokers in the market by such parameter as company reputation, expertise, structure of the broker’s risk portfolio, customer’s business area, etc.