RULES ON ADDITIONAL BRANCH OFFICES IN TAIWAN

03/01/2004

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On 4 February 2004, the Ministry of Finance announced amendments to its Regulations for Review of the Establishment by Insurance En-terprises of Branch Offices within the ROC. From now on, as long as the owners' equity of an insurer exceeds its paid-up capital, the insurer may apply to the competent authority at any time for permission to establish a branch office, in-stead of being allowed to apply only in Sep-tember of each year and submit no more than five applications in any one year as was the case in the past. Another change is that the responsible officers of an insurer's branch office must not only meet the qualifying conditions set out in the regulations, but must also meet the qualifying conditions for insurance sales agents.
The directions define the activities that an in-surer's branch office may engage in as the fol-lowing:

Receiving insurance application form from clients, and passing on the application docu-ments to the head office.

Responding to insurance-related inquiries from clients.

Receiving premium payments and passing them on to the head office.

Receiving and passing on notifications from the head office to policyholders.

Receiving and passing on insurance claims and insurance payments.

Soliciting insurance business if its staff in-cludes qualified registered insurance sales agents.

Other insurance-related but non-business ac-tivities.

A branch office that engages in activities other than the above may be ordered by the competent authority to correct the situation, within a speci-fied time period pursuant to Article 149 Para-graph 1 of the Insurance Act.