Information Governance in the Insurance & Bonding Entities

Within the newly enacted Law of Insurance and Bonding, there are several provisions incorporated that relate to the need of strengthening the information and communication systems to allow management to have a more efficient and effective business, ensuring the foundations that support the requirements of the Solvency scheme and also to ensure transparency and monitoring of the information of policyholders, investors, and the regulator.

Article 69 section II of the said Act states that, in internal control, internal comptroller function must have the appropriate reporting arrangements at all levels of the institution. It also mentions that it shall provide to the Board of Directors and the General Direction the elements necessary to assess compliance with the laws, regulations and administrative provisions. This shows the importance of Information Governance for the regulator.

Information Governance is the exercise of decision making and its authority on the information generated by the functional areas of the organization and processed by the area of ​​Information Technology, whose goal is to support the institution in:

• Improve decision making
• Reduce operative friction
• Quality information augmentation 
• Constructing standard and repeatable processes
• Reducing costs and increasing efficiency by coordinating efforts
• Guaranteeing process transparency

Information Governance can be designed according to six areas of focus and taking into account the "Principle of Proportionality', meaning you must consider the volume of operations and the nature and complexity of the activities and risks of the institution.

These six focus areas individually provide management objectives to the information system, aimed at defining the internal regulatory framework, standards of quality, safety and access, the overall structure of the system, its protection and its strategic exploitation, all for optimal decision making.

The development of the Information Governance requires that the institution questions itself diligently about the quality of its information, its chance, its effects, the benefit of their reports and the correlation with decision making.

The formalization and evolution of information and communication systems, rely on the Information Governance, having a structured methodology that responds to internal and external changes to which the Insurance and Bonding Institutions and Mutual Societies are susceptible to.