보험회사 파산시 선진국 예금보험기관의 보험금지급 사례 연구

The study examines cases of payment for the insured of the insolvent insurers by the Insurance Guarantee Schemes in advanced countries including the U.S., Japan, and some EU member countries to see what valuable implications they may have for the efficient operation of the Korea Deposit Insurance Corporation (KDIC). The first finding is that defaulted non-life insurers are generally liquidated by discontinuing insurance contracts and paying insurance benefits or refunding unearned premiums to the insured whereas life insurer failures are usually handled by transferring insurance policies to another insurer. Nevertheless, since non-life insurers in Korea also sell long-term insurance products as life insurers do, it would be desirable if insolvent domestic non-life insurers would be cleaned out by transfer of all the policies to another sound insurer because the nation's non-life insurers also sell mainly long-term insurance products as life insurers do. However, this paper recommends that some measures should be put in place to reduce moral hazard which will increase with the adoption of contract transfer. By emulating Japanese and UK cases, a plan might need to be developed to reduce policy reserves and/or assumed interest rate to distribute losses incurred by an insurer's default between KDIC and policy holders. Such a co-sharing plan should be applied to all the financial sectors including insurance and banking to remove a regulatory arbitrage gain or loss. In addition, this paper recommends introducing a risk-based deposit insurance premiums system, similar to that of Germany, to reduce moral hazard of insurers who would otherwise attempt to pursue external growth imprudently and take too much risk in their business. In advanced countries, most insolvencies of insurers were found to have resulted from their reckless management without managing risk properly which, in turn, led to hugh losses. On the other hand, this paper suggests KDIC should check and streamline insurance-related regulations in advance to avoid unnecessary legal conflicts with various stakeholders of insolvent insurers in handling IBNR reserve, reinsurance payment, and long-term development of losses in liability insurance. The more legal conflicts there are, the higher expenses will be, which will cause more serious erosion to the net worth of the insolvent insurer.