Before concluding an insurance contract

1 Are you a retail or a professional customer?

Before any distribution of an insurance product, the distributor must categorize you as a retail customer or as a professional customer. In practice, most individual customers will be placed in the category of retail customers. This brochure thus sets out the rules governing the distribution of insurance products to just that one category of customers.

2 What are your demands and needs?

Before concluding an insurance contract, the distributor must ask you questions in order to determine your demands and needs. To do so, it takes into account the complexity of the product and the type of customer you are. It must ensure that the insurance contract it is offering you is consistent with your requirements and needs.

Moreover, if the distributor offers you advice, that is to say, a personalised recommendation, regarding an insurance contract, it must be sure to explain to you why the product it recommends would best meet your demands and needs. A recommendation is personalized if it is presented as tailored to you personally or if it is based on an examination of your own situation in relation to the insurance product. This is not the case, for example, if the recommendation made is intended for the public.

Exception: the distributor is not required to comply with the information obligations that apply to your demands and needs if you are looking for insurance coverage of one or more large risks 2 .

2 Risks that fall within certain classes of insurance that are encountered chiefly by legal persons or individuals in the course of an industrial, commercial or liberal profession. The concept of “major risks” is defined in Article 5, 39°, of the Law of 4 April 2014 on insurance.

You are using the services of a distributor to conclude an insurance contract WHAT IS THE DISTRIBUTOR REQUIRED TO DO?

Demands-and-needs test

The distributor must ask you about your demands and needs and must ensure that the insurance contract proposed is consistent with them.

Without advice With advice

If the distributor offers

you advice, it will have to provide a personalized recommendation that explains why a particular product would best meet your demands and needs.

3 What information should you receive in advance?

All information you receive from the distributor must be accurate, clear and not misleading. This principle applies both to the content and to the presentation of the information. Moreover, where a distributor provides you with advertisements or advertising materials, these must be identifiable as such.

The distributor must provide you with the necessary information sufficiently far in advance of the conclusion of the contract, so that you can make an informed decision. It is possible, however, that some information is provided to you afterwards, where the insurance product concerned is being sold to you via a remote mode of communication, such as by telephone. In that case, certain conditions must be met.

You must, in particular, receive the following information 3:

Information about your categorization The distributor must inform you whether it has categorized you as a retail customer or as a professional customer. It must inform you of your right to request a change of category, where applicable, and tell you the limitations in terms of protection that may result from such a change.

Information on the type of advice provided The insurance intermediary must explain to you the nature and scope of the advice it provides, specifying for example if its advice is based on an impartial analysis. In that case, the advice must be based on the analysis of a sufficient number of insurance products available on the market so as to be able to make a personalised recommendation of the insurance contract that would be best suited to your needs.

3 Except for large risks.

Information about the distributor of insurance products The distributor must provide information about itself, specifying whether or not it offers advice 4 and providing you with the necessary information about the procedures for claims, complaints and redress.

Information about any conflicts of interest and on transparency Where the distributor is an insurance intermediary or an ancillary insurance intermediary, it must provide you with general information regarding conflicts of interest. The intermediary must also provide you with information about any shares it may hold in companies or about any shares or voting rights that certain companies may hold in its capital.

Moreover, it must inform you:

(i) if it bases its advice on an impartial and personalized analysis, (ii) if it is subject to a contractual obligation to work exclusively with certain insurance companies, in which case it must give you the names of those companies, or (iii) the name and address of the insurance companies with which it can work and works if it is not in any of the situations set out in (i) and (ii).

Information on remuneration Your insurance intermediary must inform you of the type of remuneration it receives under the terms of the insurance contract. If the distributor is an insurance company, the information should indicate the remuneration received by its staff under the terms of the insurance contract.

Where the distributor is an insurance intermediary or an ancillary insurance intermediary, it must also specify whether it works on the basis of:

(i) a fee paid by you directly; (ii) a commission of any kind included in the insurance premium; (iii) any other type of remuneration; or (iv) a combination of two or more of the above-mentioned types of remuneration.

4 If the distributor is an insurance intermediary or an insurance company.

Information about the costs and charges The FSMA has set out the detailed contents of this information in a regulation. The information must be provided to you before the conclusion of an insurance contract, as well as at each renewal date of your insurance contract.

The exact information that the distributor must provide to you differs depending on whether the contract you wish to conclude is for the compulsory civil liability insurance for motor vehicles or another type of insurance. The amounts that must be conveyed to you may be estimates. Therefore this information does not necessarily indicate the actual costs and charges you will have to pay under the terms of the insurance contract in question.

The estimates as regards the costs and charges are intended to enable you to gain a better overview of the proportion of the premium that serves to cover the risk insured by the insurance contract.

Please note: when you compare several insurance contracts, you should not stop at comparing the estimate of the costs and charges for each contract. You are advised to take other elements into account as well, such as the amount of cover provided, the amount of any excess and any exclusion clauses.

Information about insurance products The distributor is required to provide you with relevant information about the insurance product, in a comprehensible form, in order to enable you to take an informed decision. The information to be provided will vary depending on the complexity of the product and the type of customer.

If the insurance product in question is a non-life insurance product, the information will be provided to you in the form of an insurance product information document, the content, form and format of which are regulated.

The format of the information document is laid down by a European Regulation and is presented as follows (see next page).

It is in your interest to keep all the documents you receive from the distributor.

Insurance product information document

This document must contain the following information: • information about the type of insurance; • a summary of what is insured, including the main risks insured, the maximum cover and, where applicable, the geographical scope and a summary of the excluded risks; • the means and duration of payment of premiums; • the main exclusions, as a result of which no claim may be made; • obligations at the start of the contract; • obligations during the lifetime of the contract; • obligations in the event that a claim is made; • the term of the contract, including the start and end dates of the contract; • the means of terminating the contract.

The law also specifies the form of this document as well as the language in which it must be drafted.

Xxxxx lnsurance

lnsurance Product Information Document

Company: (Name insurance company) Product: (Name policy)

(Statement that complete pre-contractual and contractual information on the product is provided in other documents) What is this type of insurance?

(Description of lnsurance)

What is insured?

 xxx  xxx  xxx  xxx  xxx  xxx  xxx  xxx  xxx  xxx What is not insured?

 xxx  xxx  xxx  xxx

Are there any restrictions on cover?

! xxx ! xxx ! xxx

Where am I covered?

 xxx

What are my obligations?

— xxx — xxx — xxx

When and how do I pay?

xxx

When does the cover start and end?

xxx

How do I cancel the contract?

xxx

Before investing, please ensure you are familiar with the procedures for lodging claims, complaints and redress against the distributor of insurance products. The distributor is required to provide you with this information.