CII set to raise regional insurance standard

The Chartered Insurance Institute (CII), an organisation promoting higher standards in the insurance industry through its qualifications, has signed an agreement to provide training courses and certification in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Yemen for the first time.

Dr Sandy Scott, CEO of the CII, told Arabian Banking & Finance that the institute on Tuesday entered into partnership with Dr Adham Jaad, head of one of the biggest insurance brokers in Saudi Arabia, to provide training and testing materials for CII qualifications.

"The market has boomed in the past decade and the demand for people who have the skills, the knowledge and the understanding has grown with that market," he said.

He added that the qualification could help address the growing skills shortage in the region's insurance and takaful industry and raise standards.

"It's not just standards of knowledge, it's also standards of behaviour and ethics," Dr Scott said.

"As you begin to sell more and more complicated products - particularly to consumers - which invest in more and more complicated instruments behind them, then an understanding of risk and much more technical know-how is needed than just selling traditional products.

"Here in the Middle East, the regulator tends to regulate products, and actually in the rest of the world the regulator tends to regulate sales and the competence of the person selling the product. That reflects how important that individual's competence is because if you get that wrong then you get all sorts of mis-selling problems - we've had plenty of them in the UK and we've learnt a lot of lessons on mis-selling."

Dr Scott added that the CII would be launching a specialised takaful qualification next month in partnership with the Bahrain Institute for Banking and Finance (BIBF).

He said: "All our courses have a takaful element to them, but we have now developed with BIBF a specific takaful course which we're about to launch."

The CII's announcements come weeks after the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) announced that it would be offering its ACA qualification in the Gulf for the first time, through Phoenix Financial Training.

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