The Euro vision: How did the neighbours cope with G-Day?

With a bit of forward planning, most UK companies seem to have dealt with the increase in applications in the weeks running up to the 21 December Gender Directive deadline. But was it all overkill? Was too much made of the transition period and its impact?

One way to look at this is to see how our colleagues across the channel dealt with the change-over period. As the European Court judgment applies to all EU members, each of the 27 countries in the EU has dealt with the same issues in their own way.

In the UK, the run-up to G-Day was well advertised, anyone in the industry was overwhelmed with messages about how best to manage the change-over period.

The coverage of the potential price changes for motor insurance meant that even the general public was somewhat aware of the issue and likely to be more receptive to approaches from an adviser.

UK insurers fell into two broad camps. Those that decided the deadline was absolute: if your application was not in, underwritten and the policy on risk by 11:59 on the 20th December, your insurance would be written on gender-neutral rates. Some of these companies chose to go early and switched over to gender-neutral rates up to a month before the deadline.

The second camp took a different approach. These insurers allowed applications where underwriting was not complete at the deadline to still be issued on the original gender-specific rates. There were various versions of this - from offering full cover until the underwriting was completed, to offering just accidental death cover.

Unsophisticated markets

Many continental European nations do not have as sophisticated an insurance market as the UK does. In fact, a gender-differentiated pricing model did not exist in all countries.

In Portugal, for example, most insurance is sold through banking channels, mainly in conjunction with mortgages. Most life insurance sold in the past has been on gender-neutral premium rates anyway.

There were a small number of companies selling products with a gender-specific premium, but these were mainly the multinational insurers, which did not generally have large market shares.

The local bancassurance companies dominate the market, typically selling business at the equivalent of male rates. There has, therefore, been no need for a transition period or special deals to manage it.

Like Portugal, the Spanish market is also a bancassurance-dominated market, but sold on a gender-differentiated basis. The industry seems to have simply decided to move over to gender-neutral rates on the 21st December. There were neither special deals nor any offers for the final weeks.