Open next week from Putney to Woolwich Arsenal
Can I get a witness?
FCA has published Matt Brewis’s witness statement as part of the process to bring test cases to the high court. On initial opening it is a daunting 308 pages long. But don’t worry I have read it for you. A massive sacrifice so I wouldn’t want you to open it yourselves and uncover the fact it is effectively only 29 pages…
The statement provides interesting insight into the scale of the BI issue as FCA sees it, notably the following.
- FCA has received 1,200 emails from policyholders complaining about rejected BI claims. This is on top of the large amount of correspondence it has received from MPs and those that HM Treasury has fobbed off onto them.
- 500 policy offerings are involved spread across 40 insurers.
- There are around 8,500 affected claims.
- The total exposure on the affected claims is £1.2bn (so I return to my earlier question as to why no one saw the PR gold there would have been in paying out…)
Also of interest…
- Four consecutive full pages of just redactions – why not just leave them out?
- Why did RSA ever think marketing a policy called Cottagesure was a winner? Read quickly it sounds like something else entirely…
- And forget the Thames Clipper. If “Ms English’s” evidence is to be believed and the Lansdown Arms in Lewes has suffered an income reduction of “20%-30%” mainly due to the absence of premier league football, then it is clearly still open Full steam ahead down the A26!
What is going on axactly?
So, there remains some confusion as to what is and what is not happening vis a vis Axa and its run in with a Paris restaurant. Some of the confusion comes as a result of an odd passage of play in yesterday’s BIPAR call. Christophe Hauborg, my rrily challenged French counterpart, was providing an update in his mother tongue. Normally what happens is that Nic BIPAR then provides a summary for those of us dunces who can’t follow the original. But Nic froze in an extraordinary expression halfway through the update and then disappeared altogether. So Isabelle BIPAR had to step up. But I suspect she had not really been listening to the first part – something she attempted to style out by making her accent much thicker than normal (what I would refer to as “doing a Wenger” in tribute to the great Arsene revealing dramatically deteriorating English whenever confronted with a question he did not want to answer). Anyway, just as Isabelle was getting going, Nic, as if by magic, like the shopkeeper in Mr Ben, appeared and immediately declared that Isabelle has provided great clarity for him on a point he had not realised before without really establishing what that was. And then we moved onto the next item and, since that was me, I became distracted by my own genius and the process concluded with me no nearer the truth.
What I do know that I didn’t before is that all the policies were sold through an in-house broker. And there is a question mark over the extent to which the decision to pay out creates a precedent across the rest of Axa’s BI book. Full clarification will be with you tomorrow (if Isabelle BIPAR remains co-operative in the light of this section…).
Clucking hell
To Titirangi west of Auckland where they might have no rona but they do have a plague of feral chickens. The village has become overrun by as many as 250 of the rebellious roosters when attempts to control the population had to be suspended during lockdown. A scary prospect for a small community, I am sure you could cut the hension with a knife. It is important they resume the containment eggsercise immediately and don’t cockerel it up. They must act decisively otherwise it could prove to be too little poulet-te…
Out-hol-landish
News from the Netherlands where they have produced legislation that will prevent third country insurers from accessing the Dutch market without the need to establish.. More intriguing is the suggestion that this should never have been possible if Solvency II had been properly applied. The ban only applies to direct insurance not reinsurance. Again, if we uncover any more detail on this we will let you know.
It seems there has been a black swan event on Merseyside.