Ddigital distribution, settlement of debts, review of Book IV of the Insurance Act, the future of the profession… these are the main topics discussed at the 6th Annual Meeting of Insurance Agents and Brokers held on Wednesday 16 November. In addition to digital distribution and digitization more generally, the revision of Book IV of the Insurance Act was at the heart of the debates. “A year ago today, I announced from the same platform that we would resume the draft amendment to Book 4 of the Insurance Act. It has been done. I can assure you that the project is progressing very well,” announced Othman Khalil El Alamy, Acting President of the Insurance and Social Security Supervisory Authority (ACAPS).
In recent months, there has been a joint commission consisting of representatives of the supervisory authority and representatives of the Ministry of Finance, which has worked hard on the subject. “Before approaching the ‘wording of the law’, it was first necessary to converge visions and decide on the axes of the reform between us, the supervisory authority, guarantor of the application of standards and good practice, and the Ministry of Finance, which monitors the adequacy of the reforms in relation to the government’s general policy and the country’s strategic orientations”, made a point to specify El Alamy. For him it was also necessary to soak up the various benchmarks, other countries’ experiences and international standards.
All this work is done. Today, this joint commission has started the drafting phase of the law. It holds meetings at a very sustained pace (twice a week) and has set itself the goal of achieving a stabilized project before the end of the year. As soon as the project is completed, ACAPS will of course initiate consultations with the various stakeholders.
Towards the possibility of exercising new activities
The second announcement by the Chairman of ACAPS concerns the possibility for intermediaries to carry out new activities to diversify their sources of income. “As you know, today an insurance intermediary can perform only two activities in his premises: correspondent of a financial company or representative of a foreign insurance and reinsurance company for administration and car claims settlement,” he said. The idea is to enable insurance intermediaries to offer payment services (transfer of funds, payment of invoices, collection of taxes and duties, etc.), but also handling claims on behalf of and certain administrative services (for eg: health records) on behalf of the CNSS, or applications for driving licenses and vehicle registration documents to Narsa).
Through this openness, “we naturally hope for a positive impact on the material situation of the profession, as far as remunerated services are concerned”. But beyond this aspect, the Autorité hopes that this opening will at least allow the profession to promote its expertise and increase its contribution to important projects for the country, such as SNIF and the extension of social protection. The advantage of this initiative is that it is quick to implement, as long as it involves amending a decree. “We talked about it with the Ministry of Finance (since it is a decree) and with Bank Al-Maghrib (payment services are an activity subject to banking law), and the idea was to our great satisfaction, which was positively received,” says El Alamy.
An amendment proposed to deny deduction at source by IS
After the publication of the tax provisions of the PLF 2023, insurance intermediaries were also affected by the withholding tax on corporation tax, although their income is declared by insurance companies to DGI and ACAPS. Farid Bensaid, president of FNACAM, returned to this question. In particular, he stated that in the House of Councilors there was a proposal for a reduction, but CGEM, through the parliamentary groups, put forward an amendment to directly reject this operation, which has no reason to be . And this, “especially since the logic of this operation is to identify those who do not declare their turnover, which is not the case for us. I remain optimistic that this provision will be removed for insurance brokerage companies,” he added.
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