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Along with the new trends of reinforcing the protection of financial consumers due to global financial crisis in 2008, the 2010 amended Insurance Business Act (IBA) of Korea has strengthened the regulations on conducts of business of an insurance company. The main purpose for such reinforcement is to protect the rights of insurance policy holders more efficiently, because such policy holders' bargaining power is believed to be so weak, compared with that of an insurance company. According to this amended IBA, such strengthened regulations including the suitability principle, the duty of explanation and insurance product advertisement regulations, have been newly introduced and implemented.
Overall, it is assessed that the new strengthened measures are desirable and have positive effects on insurance consumers in terms of their protection. However, several issues need to be still improved. Thus, this article aims to analyze the problems and issues in regard to the current regulations on business conducts of an insurance company under the IBA and to suggest some recommendations for more efficient protection of insurance consumers. First, since there remain regulatory duplicate by the Fair Trade Commission and the Financial Services Commission (FSC) and double penalties against an insurance company which violates the relevant regulations on insurance product advertisements and general terms and conditions for insurance contracts, these problems need to be so rectified that the FSC should be an unitary regulator in this respect. Second, because the scope of application of the suitability principle is so narrow that it is not sufficient to protect policy holders more efficiently, the suitability principle needs to be applied regardless of whether an insurance contract is offered to potential policy holders by an insurance company, and further it should apply to other insurance products in addition to the current insurance product with variable insurance amount. Third, since the duty of explanation also applies only to an policy holder whom an insurance company promotes, this duty does not operate efficiently to fully protect insurance consumers so that it should apply to insurance consumers regardless of the time of offer of an insurance contract. In sum, the scope of application of the suitability principle and the duty of explanation should be expanded in order to protect insurance consumers more fully.

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