Law and Language
This Terms of Business is subject to English Law and the jurisdiction of the English Courts. We will use the English language for all communications, the contractual terms and conditions, and any information we are required to supply to you, before and during the duration of the contract.

Acceptance
The purpose of this agreement is to set out our professional relationship and detail the services we will provide to you.  For your own benefit and protection, you should read all of the information carefully and if you do not agree to any part of the information, please tell us. We assume that you accept the terms of this agreement unless we hear from you.

Limit of Liability
This clause restricts the amount that may be recoverable as a result of our negligence.  Other than injury or death of any person (that no cap on liability will apply), our liability to you for the services we provide shall not exceed £4,000,000 in connection with any one event or connected events.

The Regulator
We are an independent intermediary and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is an independent watchdog that regulates financial services. The FCA has authorised us to advise, arrange, deal in and assist with the placing and administration of all types of General Insurance policies. We are also authorised to undertake certain consumer credit activities. Our FCA Register number is 311163 and you can check our status and permissions at Home (fca.org.uk) by contacting the FCA on 0800 1116768.

Confidentiality and Data Protection
Please see our separate Privacy Notice. Copy available on our website or on request.

Our Fees, Commission and Charges
We usually receive a commission from the insurance provider with whom we place your business, and in such a case, the commission will be paid to us either when we are in receipt of cleared funds from you (or the premium finance company, if one has been used) or, when the insurer has received cleared funds from us in respect of the premium due under your policy. The individual agreements we have with each insurer will determine which of the two methods above is used to make this transfer of commission. We also receive commission for arranging finance agreements for the payment of insurance premiums and this is usually expressed as a percentage of the individual loan and is paid to us directly by the premium finance provider. This means that the amount you pay for credit and the overall cost of arranging your insurance will vary according to the interest charged by the lender and the amount of commission we earn.

Using premium finance makes the overall cost of the insurance more expensive. A full breakdown of the cost of your insurance and the cost of credit will be provided as part of your new business or renewal quotation before you make a decision whether to proceed. We may also receive a commission or fee for passing introductions to other professional firms.

In addition, we may make the following charges to cover the administration of your insurance:

STANDARD CHARGES – If the commission we earn from insurers for your policy does not reach the amount shown below we will increase our administration fees accordingly, and will advise you of the cost before you decide to purchase.

Minimum Income required on all Consumer products £50.00 per policy
Minimum Income required on Commercial products up to a premium of £500 £60.00 per policy
Minimum Income required on Commercial products over a premium of £500 £75.00 per policy

If the commission we earn from insurers for your policy does not reach this amount we will increase our administration fee accordingly. We will advise you of the fee before cover is arranged.

Each policy will have a minimum administration fee applied as shown below;

MINIMUM ADMINISTRATION CHARGES

New Business & Renewal Premiums £30.00
Mid-term adjustments £30.00
Refunds (we refund NET of our commission) £30.00
Credit Card Payments Nil
Debit Card Payments Nil
Cancellation (we refund NET of our commission) £30.00

Policies voided or cancelled from inception by insurers will be treated as a cancellation and we will retain any commission and fees before returning the net premium to you. By accepting these terms of business, you agree that we may retain the portion of the premium that relates to commission that would have been due to us.

Specific charges, which apply to individual policies, will be advised to you prior to the commencement of each contract applicable to that policy. The specific charge and purpose of any additional charges will always be advised to you in advance.

You are entitled to request at any time, information about the commissions that we may have received in connection with your insurance, if you want this information please contact us.

Our Service
We can act both as agent of insurer, and on behalf of you, the customer. We have in place management controls to deal with any conflicts of interest that might arise. Unless we advise you otherwise, we are acting on your behalf.

We also act on behalf of insurers when collecting premiums under risk transfer

We will ask questions to enable us to assess reasonably your insurance requirements, this may include checking information that we already hold about you and your existing insurance arrangements with us and other parties.

We will provide you with advice and guidance, after assessing what you want and need and recommend a suitable policy based on our experience of dealing with similar risks.

We will confirm to you the level of service we are providing as part of our sales process.
In all cases our service will include arranging and administering your insurance, including helping you with on-going changes and assisting you if you need to make a claim, or where we outsource claims handling facilities to give you an enhanced service.

If we use the services of another intermediary to place your insurance we will advise you of the name of the intermediary we use and the name of the insurer. If you mislay your policy at any time, we will arrange a replacement policy document, if you request it.

Our Selection (Fair and Personal Analysis)
We offer products from a wide range of product providers (i.e., insurance companies) and sometimes use other distributors (i.e., sub-agents) to access products. Our selection usually involves presenting to a reasonable number of insurance companies that will insure for the risk at hand, and this is called a fair and personal analysis of the market.  Sometimes we may only approach two or three insurers and this is a limited Panel, or in some cases, we may only approach one insurer, in either case, we will tell you the basis as part of our selling process. You can also request a list of the companies that form the Panel we have approached. The processes we have in place means that the characteristics of these products take account of our target customer’s demands and needs and include sourcing products from one or more of the product providers we deal with.

Our Product Selection (Panel)
We only offer products from a panel of insurers, that we have selected as appropriate for the cover you require. The processes we have in place means that the characteristics of these products take account of our target customer’s demands and needs  and include sourcing products from one or more of the product providers we deal with. We will also provide a list of the companies that form the Panel we have approached at quotation stage should you require this.
Our Product Selection (Single Insurer)

Sometimes we only offer products from one insurer and so do not approach other providers. We will advise you if we are contractually obliged to use any insurer.

Demands and Needs
Consumers
In assessing your demands and needs we will ask you a number of questions. It is your responsibility to ensure you give us complete and accurate answers to any such questions, not only when you take out your policy, but also when you decide to renew or make any changes during any term of a contract of insurance (this applies to any changes in information relating to any individual named on the policy.) We will make a specific personalised recommendation for product suitability based on our understanding and appraisal of your demands and needs requirements.  Where we provide you with specific advice, we will give you the relevant information you require, honestly, fairly, and professionally and in a way that is in your best interests (i.e., we will alert you to important terms and conditions about the contract of insurance, and we will provide you that information when it is most relevant). This may include information about comparable products between different product providers, all of which will help you to decide whether to go ahead with any particular contract of insurance.

Non-Consumers
If you are dealing with us in a commercial capacity, you will be under a duty to make a fair presentation. You are therefore required to disclose any matter which you know or ought to know that would influence the judgement of an insurer in deciding whether to insure the risk and on what terms. If you are unsure whether matter is relevant or not you should provide sufficient information so as to put an insurer on notice that it needs to make further enquiries if necessary.

We will make a specific personalised recommendation for product suitability based on our understanding and appraisal of your demands and needs requirements.  Where we provide you with specific advice, we will give you the relevant information you require, honestly, fairly, and professionally and in a way that is in your best interests (i.e., we will alert you to important terms and conditions about the contract of insurance, and we will provide you that information when it is most relevant). This may include information about comparable products between different product providers, all of which will help you to decide whether to go ahead with any particular contract of insurance.

Method of Communication
Whilst you do have a choice in the way we communicate with you, we will principally provide you with information using email (or some other means to enable you to access information electronically). During the process of dealing with us you will be given an option to receive information in this way, meaning if you would like information in a paper format, we will be happy to provide it.

Conflict Management
Whilst we act in the capacity of agents for our product providers (i.e., the insurance companies we do business with) we are required to have in place appropriate governance controls to help us meet our regulatory objectives. We have in place effective organisational controls, including appropriate supervision, to ensure we manage any and all conflicts of interests which may arise or may be identified from time to time, this includes gifts and benefits granted and accepted, which may damage the interests of our relationship with either our distributors or our customers.

Our Customers Best Interests
Our primary aim is to ensure, for any customer (or potential customer) that we act honestly, fairly and professionally and in the customers best interest including giving customers information they might need to understand the relevance of any information we provide, as well as objectively giving that information when it is most useful to a customer to enable informed decision making.

Financial Strength
We regularly assess the financial strength of the Insurance Companies and other intermediaries that we deal with. The process usually involves general observation of the financial ratings applied by independent rating agencies such as Standard & Poor’s and A M Best published with other readily available information within industry guides, newsletters and press releases. Whilst we take care to deal with companies that maintain reasonable solvency margins, we cannot guarantee their financial ability to pay claims.

Call Recording
Your call may sometimes be recorded for training or monitoring purposes. If this happens, we ensure all call recordings  are protected in the same way as any other digital or written data in strict accordance with the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR) and The Data Protection Act (DPA) 2018.

Money
We will hold money that you pay to us in accordance with the regulators rules or under a risk transfer agreement with insurers. This will include holding your money in one of the following ways.

A statutory trust client bank account that only allows us to use the money held in trust on behalf of a customer for paying that customers’ premium to an insurance company and to pay premium refunds or claims we receive from that insurance company to the customer, once the premium has been received from that insurance company. We cannot use that customer’s money to pay another customers premium or refund. Also for this reason it is not possible for you to offset the refund against premiums owed on another policy. We do not pay any interest on premiums held by us in the course of arranging and administering your insurance, unless, in the case of consumer transactions we receive more than £20 per transaction, and then we will ask for your permission to retain the interest.  Unless you tell us otherwise, you are consenting to us holding your money in this way.

A non-statutory trust insurer bank account in accordance with our agreements with Insurance Companies that transfer the risk of money we receive from customers to them, these agreements deem any money you pay to us, to be received by them and they will bear the risk of any losses in the event that our firm becomes insolvent. This includes claims money or premium refunds we receive prior to being paid to you.

By holding your money in one of these ways, means that in the event that this firm becomes insolvent your money remain protected. In arranging your insurance we may employ the services of other intermediaries who are regulated by the FCA and your premium may be passed to these intermediaries for payment to insurers. These firms are also required to hold clients’ money in a separate trust account. We will also inform you if at any time we are required to pass your premium to firms that operate outside the UK where the protection may be different. Should you not wish us to pass premiums to a firm outside of the UK, please inform us.

Payment Options
We will provide you with full details of all the payment options available to you when we provide you with your insurance premium. If you choose to enter in a finance arrangement, this will be subject to interest charges that we will confirm to you when providing the full details.  Importantly, the arrangement you will enter into will be with the finance company not us. It is an entirely separate contract irrespective of the insurance contract.  In the event of your failure to meet with the contractual obligations regarding payment the finance provider could approach the insurer to seek a termination of the insurance contract to recoup their outstanding finance arrears. You will be liable to pay their costs and charges if you do not keep up your repayments and cover is cancelled under your policy. This is because the agreement is between you, the policyholder and the finance company direct, not us or the insurer. Please note that we only use Close Brothers Premium Finance for the provision of premium finance facilities.

Cancellation
Please contact us if you wish to cancel any policy that we have arranged for you. Customers acting outside their trade or profession (Consumers) will usually have a legal right to cancel policies for any reason, subject to no claims having occurred, within 14 days of receiving the full terms & conditions. You will always be advised where this Right applies. A charge may apply for the period of cover provided and, in addition, an administration charge will apply as shown in the charges section above, cancellation under this right must be in writing, prior to expiry of the 14-day cancellation period, to our usual office address at IBA insurance Services Limited, Osborne House, 111 High Street, King’s Lynn, Norfolk. PE30 1DA. Or you can call us on 01553 770112 or email us at enquiries@ibainsurance.co.uk.

Complaints
Our aim is always to provide our customers with a first-class service; however we are aware that, occasionally, it is possible that we may fail to meet your expectations. If for any reason we have not met your expectations, let us know as soon as possible, by calling our main office telephone 01553 770112, or write to Nick Osborne, IBA insurance Services Limited, Osborne House, 111 High Street, King’s Lynn, Norfolk. PE30 1DA or email enquiries@ibainsurance.co.uk

If we are unable to resolve the issue to your satisfaction by the end of the third business day, we will formally investigate the matter.  You will receive an acknowledgement of the matter together with a copy of our complaints process promptly and certainly within 5 working days. We will then aim to investigate and provide a resolution as quickly as possible, informing you of the position at no later than 4 weeks and a final response no later than 8 weeks.

If you are not happy with our response, or the position after a period of 8 weeks, you may be eligible to refer your complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service (FOS) for an independent assessment and opinion.

The FOS Consumer Helpline is on 0800 023 4567 (free for people phoning from a “fixed line” (for example, a landline at home) or 0300 123 9123 (free for mobile-phone users paying monthly charge for calls to No’s starting 01 or 02). Alternatively you can contact them at Financial Ombudsman Service, Exchange Tower, Harbour Exchange Square, London E14 9SR www.financial-ombudsman.org.uk

A full copy of our complaints procedure is available on request.

Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS)
If we are unable to meet our obligations, you may be entitled to compensation from the FSCS. If we have advised or arranged insurance for you this will be covered for 90% of a claim, without any upper limit, however compulsory classes of insurance (such as motor insurance) is covered for 100% of a claim.  Further information is available from the FSCS helpline on 0207 892 7300 and www.fscs.org.uk.

The FSCS is the UK’s statutory fund of last resort for customers of authorised financial services firms.  Compensation is usually payable if an authorised firm is unable or unlikely to pay claims usually because it has ceased trading or become insolvent

Insurance Premium Tax (IPT)

Your premium detailed in the policy will include IPT at the prevailing rate.

Should the rate of IPT be amended by the Government, your premium will be amended by the insurer to reflect the change.

Some polices are subject to Value Added Tax (VAT) not IPT and should the rate of VAT be amended by the Government, your premium will be amended by the insurer to reflect the change.

Ownership
There is no ownership between us and any insurance company.

Termination
You may cancel this agreement with us at any time. You must provide at least 14 days written notice of instructions. We also reserve the right to cancel this agreement at any time. In any event, we will provide you with reasonably sufficient time to re-arrange your insurance and we will notify you of termination in writing together with an explanation if appropriate.