Legal Issues Of Commercial Banks Invest In The Insurance Business

The history of cooperation between the commercial bank and the insurance company is not long, and in its 30 years' development process, their cooperation experienced the following 3 stages:the first stage is the model that the commercial bank make agreements with the insurance company to be its agent vendor;the second stage is that their cooperation bases on a kind of strategic partnership; the third stage is that one can owns the other's equities. The cooperation between them in the foreign countries has skipped the first two stages, and it has came into the third stage, however,the cooperation in our country is still in the first stage or the second stage now. Compared with foreign countries, the competitive strength of our commercial banks and insurance companies is at a disadvantage position obviously.Our country had taken measures to open it at 2008, and introduced related regulations at 2009.The country hopes to develop it, and changes the phenomenon that the cooperation between them is at a lower level now.But we must face it that our country widely lacks this kind of cooperation basing on taking stakes, and now the nature of the new policy is "trying", and the regulations released by the China Banking Regulatory Commission is not rather detailed. For it, the road of it is still not flat, it is necessary for us to analysis it and discuss it from a legal point of view.Referring the commercial bank's investment in the insurance company, we may see it involves a lot of legal matters. But, if we see it from the macro point of view with considering the following factors:the way of access, the operation and the regulation, we could find that such matters should be solved at first:the legal matter of the financial management system, the judgement of eligibility of investors and investments, the limitation of proportion of stakes, the measures of risk prevention and the financial regulatory regime. It is useful for us to discuss such matters to improve related systems.Refering to other countries and regions, and combining with our practice, we can take measures to the previous matters:the first, in order to provide legal protection, we should promote financial Mixed legislation, and improve the legislation of financial management system, and affirm the cross-industry business in the basic financial law;the second, restricts the qualification of investors and investments strictly, and requests them must be qualified, thus, we can reduce risks from the source;the third, limits the proportion of stakes to set a maximum amount, so they can maintain the boundaries, and we can promote our finance by defending market competition;the fourth, we should improve the firewall and enhance information revealing to control risks;the fifth,we should learn from regulatory regime to regulate the cooperation well and protect the long-term development of our bankassurance.