Japan's insurance regulator has closed a shortcut that let agencies selling policies from several insurers recommend a preferred company without first sorting the field by what the customer actually wants. The Financial Services Agency published its responses to 759 comments from 133 individuals and organizations on draft rules governing "comparison and recommendation" sales at multi-line agencies, the kind that carry more than one insurer's products.
The operative change: the FSA is deleting Clause ハ under Article 227-2(3)(4) of the Insurance Business Act Enforcement Regulation, the option that let an agency recommend a specific insurer's policy without first running the customer through an intent-based selection process. Agencies that want to recommend a specific policy must now tie that recommendation to a selection process built on the customer's stated intent, narrowing the field to match what the customer says matters to them, and then explaining why.
| Sales method | Before the reform | After the reform |
|---|---|---|
| Method ロ: select and recommend one or more contracts matching the customer's stated intent | Permitted | Retained; used for intent-based selection and recommendation |
| Method イ: explain differences between contracts, including why one is preferable | Permitted | Retained |
| Method ハ: recommend a contract without first running an intent-based selection | Permitted | Abolished |
The FSA's own account of the trigger is broader than any single case. Commenters asked whether the change was a reaction to the Bigmotor scandal; the agency agreed that incident was part of the story but said the deeper problem is structural: insurers' commission tables, sales-target incentives and other support extended to agencies have been shaping which policy customers end up buying, regardless of what those customers wanted.
The comment responses spell out, case by case, what now counts as an acceptable reason to recommend one insurer over another, and what does not. Commission levels, sales quotas and perks or support an insurer gives an agency cannot serve as the "reasonable and specific" basis for a recommendation, the FSA repeated across dozens of answers, even when the products barely differ. A customer saying "I'll leave it to you" or "just recommend whatever" does not by itself let an agent skip ahead to picking one insurer; the agency still has to try to draw out what the customer cares about, price, coverage, riders, before narrowing the field. Scripts designed to get a customer to volunteer "surprise me" so the agent can dodge that step are explicitly ruled out.
Two practical guardrails will matter most to agencies working out how to comply. The FSA declined industry requests to fix a minimum number of insurers that must be compared, such as roughly five; the required scope depends on the customer's stated intent rather than a headcount. And "two or more comparable similar contracts" is defined by what an agency's actual distributor agreement with each insurer allows, not by informal in-house rules, so an agency cannot simply decide internally to stop offering a slow-selling insurer's products and treat that as removing it from the comparison pool unless the change is documented with the insurer itself.
The revised Cabinet Office Order was promulgated the same day the comment results were released; both the order and the matching revisions to the FSA's supervisory guidelines take effect March 1, 2028. That gives multi-line agencies roughly eighteen months to rebuild recommendation scripts, staff training and record-keeping before the rule bites. The FSA's preference is that they not wait: it told agencies to move to compliant systems "as soon as possible" rather than treat the 2028 date as the moment to start.