즉시연금보험약관의 법적 쟁점

Starting from September 2018, 15 lawsuits related to immediate annuity in total have been filed. Regarding the application for mediation, the insurer has accepted the recommendation of the Financial Disputes Settlement Committee(FDSC) of Financial Supervisory Service(FSS) in Korea. However, the problem began when the insurer filed a lawsuit for confirmation of nonexistence of obligation against other policyholders who were applying for dispute mediation, insisting they would be judged by the court through litigation. The lawsuit regarding immediate annuity, reaching the total amount of disputes about 1 trillion won, is currently pending in the Supreme Court of Korea as the result of the first trial courtʼs ruling was in favor of the consumer, and then the result of the High Courtʼs ruling was in favor of insurer. Analyzing the judicial precedents related to immediate annuity cases leads to the issues that the instructional wordings of the calculation method cannot be incorporated into the annuity policy(or T&C), and that the incorporation of the policy per se has already become fait accomplias and it is determined whether the duty to explain is violated. The calculation method is a professional actuarial document with mathematics formulas and is one of the basic documents along with the policy under the Korea Insurance Business Act. It is questionable whether the instructional wordings alone can be considered as the contents of the policy. In order for the policy to be effectively incorporated into a contract, the insurer must provide the contents of the policy in a way that consumers can easily understand them in accordance with the principle of transparency in Art. 3 of the Korea Standard Form Contract Regulation Act(or T&C Regulation Act), and according to the duty to explain the policy, the contents of the policy, depending on the type, must be specified in a generally expected manner, and when requested by the consumer, a copy of the policy must be delivered to the consumer. Of course, the insurer must also perform its duty to explain the important contents of the policy so that consumers can comprehend them without any difficulties. In consumer contracts utilizing the policy(or T&C), there is a possibility that the insurer, that is the policy maker, can abuse the formative status on the contents of the policy for its own contractual interest, and the superior status is a result of information asymmetry using the instructional wordings of the calculation method in this immediate annuity case, and it leads to a continuous imbalanced relationship. This imbalance must be corrected, at least through judicial control on the policy, which in turn ensures fairness to consumer contracts in regard to the policy. Therefore, the calculation method with actuarial mathematics formulas that are hard to understand, just by using the instructional wordings in the annuity policy, should not be incorporated into the content of the contract. Even if the calculation method is included in the policy with the indirect instructions, as the insurer insists, it is important content in the contract and is subject to the duty to explain. The duty to explain the policy is an obligation added before the contract to mitigate information asymmetry between insurer and policyholder, and to be incorporated into the policy, the duty to explain the significant contents of the contract must be implemented. Only then the unbalanced state of interest caused by the difference in unequal bargaining power will be complemented or corrected. In accordance with this comprehensive perspective, the indirect instructional wordings of the calculation method etc. are not incorporated into the immediate annuity policy.