The governance of insurance undertakings

Abstract

Insurance law is multidisciplinary by nature, as it necessarily must interact with other disciplines, such as actuarial sciences or finance. However, this multi-disciplinarity also concerns the intersection with other branches of law. Most of the insurance undertakings are corporations and, as such, they are subject to corporate law rules, while insurance law is increasingly taking on a transnational connotation in regulating the organisation and activity of insurance companies. The combination of company law and insurance-specific rules is at the heart of this investigation. This book is a collection of contributions from authors with different legal cultures, and it aims to identify the legal issues that arise from the intersection of these two disciplines, i.e., insurance law and corporate/company law. The issues entailed are examined mainly based on the European Union (EU) law, although there are also contributions from other legal systems that enrich the perspective with which to approach those issues. The book includes two parts. The first part collects six contributions that analyse different profiles of the system of governance of insurance undertakings. The analysis concerns the regulations introduced by the Directive Solvency II and the corporate law of relevant EU jurisdictions. However, one of the chapters contributed tackles the issue from the perspective of Singaporean law that aspires to become the leading (re)insurance and risk transfer hub in Asia. The second part contains eight contributions that examine the intersections between the insurance business and corporate law. They include extraordinary corporate operations, supervision, reporting, customer relations, and claims handling management, whilst one contribution focuses on private international law issues. Again, the issues entailed are examined mainly based on and from the perspective of the European Union (EU) law. Still, the supranational nature of the insurance business also allows the experiences of other legal systems to be included in the analysis, since they can provide valuable insights to other regulators. This book fills a gap in the legal literature that has examined the two branches of law, i.e., insurance regulation and corporate law, separately so far. With the objective difficulty of examining rules with different levels of transnational harmonisation, the effort made is to provide as much a “unitary” vision as possible of the legal issues entailed and herein examined. This effort is made, nonetheless, with the awareness that those issues are mainly perceived and managed as such in practice. It is left upon the reader to undertake the task of evaluating the efficacy of this effort. The law stands as on 27th April 2021.