President of the Jamaica-based Insurance Company of the West Indies (ICWI) Paul Lalor says the company is prepared to meet all the proposed regulatory requirements in the Insurance Bill 2013.
The legislation calls for more robust operating requirements for insurers in this jurisdiction following the collapse of Clico and the Hindu Credit Union. It also gives the Central Bank new oversight powers.
"We come from a highly regulated environment anyway," Lalor told the T&T Guardian. "In most of the territories that we are in, we have had massive legislative changes in two or three of them already, so we are quite used it.
"A lot of what we are doing now is what is going to be introduced in the new legislation. Registering salesman, anti-money laundering requirements, all of these we already know how to do. We have been doing them since 2003 in Jamaica, in Cayman Islands, the Bahamas."
Lalor said ICWI has "quite a robust compliance team and we are more than ready to be able to deal with the changes that are coming with this new legislation."
ICWI entered the local market in October 2013 with the acquisition of Great Northern which at the time wrote insurance policies for an estimated 24,000 clients. Since then, it has secured a license to operate locally and plans to expand into the property market.
"We are a company that wants to write both motor and property, but we are starting with motor and slowly starting to introduce property to the clients that we already have. Through the brokers, we hope to pick up some incremental business as well and create a multi-channel business in the sense of having agents directly throughout our twelve locations," Lalor said.
Responding to questions about the impact of the European Commission's blacklist of 14 Caribbean countries, Lalor said that development was cause for concern since perception alone could affect foreign direct investment into the region. Fortunately, the Caribbean has a certain appeal and large hotel brands wanted to have properties in the region, he said.
"So I think we can look forward to foreign direct investment. Foreign direct investment is one of the easiest ways for our Caribbean economies to get necessary in flows that allow the economy to spin. If the economy spins, then insurance companies become more relevant, because we are the underpinning of all economic activity and therefore I am not sure that report is going to dissuade foreign direct investment.
"I do think there is a definite need for us as a region to think about our taxation and to think about our obligation to pay taxes, because that in and of itself, too, assist the economies to grow."
He added: "In Jamaica, we are certainly over taxed in my opinion and we are easy targets. We have to report on a quarterly basis. Everybody knows what we are doing. We get regularly investigated with periodic visits by the regulator. From that perspective, we are doing what we need to, we are paying. What we want to make sure is that the economic impact of a report like that isn't detrimental to FDI, because that's what we need to keep our businesses growing."
