A Study On The Duty Of Insurer In Unit-Linked Insurance

The investment-linked insurance has a short history in Taiwan. However, with all the promoting and contemporary market advantages, even such a short history can bring a huge boom. In fact, there has been a big wave of consumers involved or affected by investment-linked policies nowadays in Taiwan. As a result, the importance of researching on legal issues of the investment-linked insurance has also arisen.his thesis is based on the similarity of financial products, especially focused on the similarity between “trust” and “the separate account of the investment-linked insurance”. There have been a lot of researches, even codified statutes processing on “trust” or “fiduciary relationship within a trust”. Before referring to those literatures, this thesis makes one hypothesis that assumes there is plenty of similarity between trust and investment-linked insurance to sustain the legitimacy of referring the regulation upon trust to separate account. While this hypothesis has been proven to stand, and the boundary of similarity has been clarified, the literatures processing trust and fiduciary can then be referred to investment-linked insurance. n detail, this thesis applies the abovementioned model to two concrete issues. One is a classic dilemma in fiduciary—the conflict of interest, or the control over affiliated transactions. This issue is quite common within the field of financial regulating—even several domestic statutes has been assessing at this issue. Though, in the case of investment-linked insurance, this issue has hardly been noticed. In this thesis, under the similarity model, discussion on the control over conflict of interest will be applied to investment-linked insurance, attempting to clarify how the conflict of interest happens and how shall the law respond to this issue within investment-linked insurance. he second concrete issue is the interpretation of investment-linked contract, focusing on the duty of the insurer to subrogate. There has been a complete methodology of contract interpretation, within which, applying default rules of similar contracts to fill up the blank of contract has always been one of the commonest method. With the similarity check earlier in this thesis, the conclusion is very useful in this section to continue interpreting, or filling up the blank in investment-linked contract. This section will further apply the default rules in trust to figure out whether there should be a duty of the insurer to subrogate.