The parent company of Promovendum must pay a fine of 2.5 million euros because the insurer has provided customers with unclear, incorrect and misleading information, among other things. The Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) announced this on Friday. According to the regulator, the insurance company has structurally and “partly intentionally” violated the law for more than three years.
Promovendum is an insurance company that focuses on highly educated people. The company refuses customers without a higher professional education or university education or a HAVO or VWO diploma, or only accepts them if they want to pay a higher premium. Its parent company, CAK Dordrecht BV, offers under the label of Promovendum but also under the name Besured insurance for, among other things, the car, roadside assistance, travel, legal assistance and care.
Fiddling with customer numbers
According to the AFM, CAK committed the violations between 2019 and 2021. According to the financial watchdog, the company, mainly under the label Promovendum, “deliberately communicated premium increases and an adjustment of insurance conditions so vaguely” that customers could overlook these important changes. to see. CAK also cheated with customer reviews on its website, by barely making negative customer reviews visible and by not being transparent about the way the customer satisfaction rating was calculated. For example, reviews from canceling customers were not displayed.
The AFM is also critical of how CAK communicated its remuneration policy and of the lack of the option for customers to receive a paper version of their policy and insurance conditions.
All in all, the AFM states that CAK did not pursue an ‘adequate policy’ to guarantee ‘honest conduct of its business’. This is a violation of the Financial Supervision Act. According to this law, financial service providers must prevent their employees from committing criminal offenses that “could damage confidence in the financial service provider or the financial markets”.
In a response to the AFM report, CAK says it disagrees with the fine decision and the company has “serious question marks about the due care” of the investigation. According to CAK, customers “contrary to what the AFM suggests” would not have been deliberately disadvantaged or misled in any way. CAK also points out that it immediately adjusted its business operations in response to instructions from the AFM – even though the insurer did not agree that this concerned violations of the law. As a result, according to the parent company of Promovendum, there have been no “violations” since 2021. The company has appealed the fine.
Not a member of the Dutch Association of Insurers
CAK has existed since the early eighties and was founded as an insurance company for people in education. Since 2010 it has mainly been active under the brand name Promovendum, known for its many radio commercials for car insurance. The insurer is not a member of the Dutch Association of Insurers and is therefore not bound by the rules that most insurers in the Netherlands have agreed on, including not excluding potential customers from groups with higher risks.
Achmea’s chairman of the board, Bianca Tetteroo, was recently in NRC still critical of insurers that threaten to undermine this principle of solidarity. “Without solidarity you have no insurance. You are willing to share risks with each other, making it affordable for the entire population. […] we do see examples of technology companies and insurers, not affiliated to the Association, who get the cherry out of the pie. Who profile themselves as ‘only highly educated people’ or ‘only medical specialists’. With that you already make a selection and there is less solidarity.”
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