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China will completely fulfil its commitment to the World Trade Organization (WTO) on the liberalization of its insurance market, while enhancing supervision of foreign-funded insurers, said Ma Yongwei, chairman with the China Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC) Friday.
"The CIRC will finalize this year a set of detailed implementation methods for each commitment made about the insurance sector opening and see that it is actually carried out,'' Ma said at Friday's National Insurance Conference for directors of both Chinese and foreign-funded insurers.
CIRC will also sketch out a series of complementary rules and regulations about the supervision of foreign insurers in light of the Foreign-Funded Insurance Company Management Provisions issued by the State Council at the beginning of the year, Ma added.
This year, the commission will foster communication with regulatory authorities from the home countries of the foreign-funded companies. The commission also plans to deal heavy blows to foreign insurers' doing businesses in China without permission and keep a close eye on internal business transactions between foreign-funded insurers and their parent companies.
"Some foreign-funded companies were found to have violations during our inspection last year,'' Ma said.
Apart from strengthened regulation, the CIRC will also facilitate mutual learning as well as the development of domestic and foreign-funded insurance companies this year, Ma said.
Another important task this year will be to shift the regulatory focus from the insurance companies' market behaviour to their solvency ability.
The commission has already examined the solvency condition of each insurance company through a massive investigation last year.
"Some are not good,'' said Ma, declining to divulge specific names.
"This year we will further revise the solvency supervision system, and in the future we will divide insurance companies into different groups according to their solvency condition and assert different regulation standards,'' he said.
To increase the overall quality of the regulatory officials, Ma said CIRC plans to bring in a number of experts from overseas.
"If eligible, we can even invite the experts to become the CIRC vice-chairperson,'' he said.
Ma said the regulator would licence more operational identities for the insurance market, facilitate the readjustment of insurance-related tax policies and help widen the investment channel of insurance funds this year.
China's insurance industry saw the fastest growth last year among recent years by harvesting a total of 210.9 billion yuan (US$25.5 billion) of premium income, up 32.2 per cent from the previous year.
(China Daily February 8, 2002)
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