Product Oversight and Customer Demands and Needs : Contract Law Implications

One of the Insurance Distribution Directive’s main drives is the fight against the misselling of insurance products. This paper identifies the various forms of combatting insurance misselling which are present in the IDD, with an emphasis on product oversight and governance requirements and on the customer demands-and-needs test. In its mission to regulate the market conduct of insurance distributors, the IDD’s main focus is on the establishment of legal duties. This paper reflects on the contract law implications of the creation of such legal duties. It does not delve into the national laws of one or more Member States. After concluding that at some point such legal duties become the jural correlatives of individual rights, it maps out, in abstract, the types of pre-contractual or contractual remedies that would best suit the enforcement of such rights by insurance customers as against insurance distributors