CHARTERED INSURANCE INSTITUTE UK TO MERGE WITH ANZIIF, CHANGE NAME ETC.

Excerpts:

'Dear Mr Kapito

Following the President’s message to you last month, as promised I am writing with more information on the proposed merger between the CII and ANZIIF (Australian and New Zealand Institute of Insurance and Finance)......

Name of the merged entity

On the first point I would like to make it clear that nothing is set in stone – this is a period of consultation with our members and we both expect and welcome feedback. We will be listening carefully to the feedback of our membership over the coming months.

It has become clear that a large number of our members – particularly those working in General Insurance - feel very strongly that it is important to retain the word “Insurance” in the name of the institute, both as an acknowledgement of our heritage and to accurately describe the specific sector in which they work. On the other hand, there is enthusiasm for incorporating “Financial Services” in the name to reflect the full range of activities in which our members are engaged. Given this feedback, and following consultation with the wider market, I believe we are now likely to put this latter option – the Chartered Institute of Insurance and Financial Services (CIIFS) – to the membership vote.

Information on the merger

You will be aware we have created a dedicated website for the merger – www.institutemerger.com– which already contains FAQs and also provides all members with the opportunity to provide feedback to the CII. The content of this site will expand as we proceed through the consultation process and our preference is to ask members to share their feedback through this site. This means we are able to provide a consistent approach across the entire worldwide membership and also ensure we can monitor and analyse the feedback in a structured manner.

We have already responded on the website to some of the most frequent enquiries; for instance we have proposed that the existing designations ACII and FCII will remain unchanged and that our Chartered titles for individuals will also be unaffected. Similarly, our Representative Council and other aspects of our governance so recently reviewed will remain unchanged. Therefore I would urge you to address your questions through this route.

Financial benefits

On the particular point of the finances, detailed due diligence was prepared by KPMG and reviewed by the Board. The cost / benefit analysis is a relatively straight-forward affair since, for negligible costs, we are benefiting from:

• An additional £6m of revenue, taking our revenues from £30.5m to £36.5m (this would take a number of years to achieve this growth through other means)
• £3.3.m net assets, with £2.2m cash assets
• No ongoing cash drain, since ANZIIF has no pension deficit and has a record of breaking even or better and is forecast to do so again this year
• Use of ANZIIF’s core member system which could save us incurring several million pounds to replace our core system which is over 20 years old. ...........

…in addition to a number of other benefits, such as:

• Growing to over 105,000 members in around 170 countries with offices in London, Melbourne, Mumbai, Bahrain, Hong Kong, Singapore and Auckland
• Creating the best possible benefit package for members wherever they are based in the world
• Nearly doubling the number of overseas members (14,000 to 26,000) and raising the proportion of non-UK revenue from 12% to over 30% of the total
• Becoming the clear market leader in South East Asia .......

Yours sincerely,

Dr Alexander Scott

Chief Executive Officer, CII