Does the use of comparison calculators by brokers guarantee that the advice is based on a ‘sufficient number of insurance contracts offered on the market and of insurers’ as required by § 60 VVG?
At this point, lawyer Dr. Johannes Fiala, lecturer for insurance law at the DHBW Heidenheim, will answer your questions. You can ask questions by sending an email to ott@dhbw-heidenheim.de. From the series of newsletters of the DHBW (Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State University) Heidenheim on the topic “Mediation Law in Practice”:
If the insurance broker does not use a “sufficient number of offers” from the market as a basis, he must disclose this to the customer without being asked to do so (duty to inform). It follows that a sufficient number of different insurers must also be taken as a basis so that the broker can make a recommendation on the basis of professional criteria as to which insurance contract is suitable for meeting the needs of the policyholder. Particularly in cases of a change of insurance contract – especially changes, tariff changes or rescheduling – the insurance broker must provide the customer with a comprehensible and orderly overview of all essential circumstances of the insurance offered that are relevant to benefits and premiums.
It is problematic that information offers from the intranet or extranet as well as via rating software rarely show all necessary concrete differences of the products in order to be able to recommend one of the products in a qualified manner. In many cases, only general tariff information is available, which does not even make it possible to obtain a concrete overview of all the advantages and disadvantages of the products, which would regularly require a detailed analysis of the insurance conditions. Anyone who uses software or portals for an insurance comparison must reckon with the fact that the programmer has often filtered or weighted selection criteria without this initially being apparent to the user. Then the later analysis of the documentation for the mediation, as it is regularly generated by the free software, can be the insurance broker’s undoing.
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About the author
Dr. Johannes FialaPhD, MBA, MM
Dr. Johannes Fiala has been working for more than 25 years as a lawyer and attorney with his own law firm in Munich. He is intensively involved in real estate, financial law, tax and insurance law. The numerous stages of his professional career enable him to provide his clients with comprehensive advice and to act as a lawyer in the event of disputes.
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