Insurance Disclosures on the Marketing Brochure
by John Burnett, BOL Guru Guru Bios
Question: We use an insurance agency to market a long term care insurance product to our bank customers written through Blue Cross Blue Shield. In our compliance exam we were cited for not including the required insurance disclosures on the marketing brochure that we include in our checking statements 2 or 3 times per year. The insurance agency provides the disclosure and obtains acknowledgement of receipt from our customers when the customer contacts the agency regarding the long term care policy. The agency maintains the records of the acknowledgements and we advised the examiners that these records were available for their review. Were we cited because we did not include the disclosures on our marketing brochure at least in a shortened form? What's your take on this? We did not get a good response from the examiner and he would not remove the citation even after we provided the info from the insurance agency.
Answer:To completely answer this, the ad would have to be reviewed, but I can provide you with a resource to help you review this. Remember, bankers are not always right, and neither are examiners.
The rules you are discussing were put in place under Section 305 of the GLB Act. I would focus on the paragraph stating "Nothing in this paragraph requires the inclusion of the foregoing disclosures in advertisements of a general nature describing or listing the services or products offered by an institution." Again, the depth of the ad may be in question and you should review this reference against any citation from your examiner. The following disclosures are very common in any advertisement for non deposit insurance products when they are not general in nature.
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