The EU Insurance Mediation Directive – Bureaucracy or Opportunity?

The insurance mediation directive of the EU contributes to the recent regulation of financial services markets in order to improve customer protection. Many financial services providers as well as insurance intermediaries fear expensive documentation overhead. In this paper, we argue that the documentation requirements offer a variety of chances. As neither the directive nor national law explicitly specify which customer data has to be collected, we analyse the propositions of respective associations. Moreover, we reason that overall data quality, i.e. completeness, correctness, currency, and consistency of customer data, will probably be influenced in a positive way. With this knowledge in mind, we finally present a set of scenarios from the field of customer relationship management such as advisory process and campaign management that undeniably benefit from a better documentation of customer data.