Advice and information system for the insurance industry

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The information and information system of the insurance industry ( HIS ), until April 1, 2011 referred to as Uniwagnis or risk information , is a common warning and information database of the insurance companies organized in the German Insurance Association (GDV). For data protection reasons, the operation of the credit agency was outsourced to a separate company on April 1, 2011, Informa HIS GmbH (formerly informa Insurance Risk and Fraud Prevention GmbH) - an Arvato subsidiary of the Bertelsmann Group .

Entries

Data of the policyholders and of injured parties, insured persons and others, for example witnesses, as well as vehicles, buildings and other objects are saved. According to the GDV, the file is used to detect insurance fraud and abuse.

The entries are made in seven categories:

  1. Vehicle
  2. accident
  3. Legal protection
  4. Sach
  5. Life (risk positions: special risk, occupational disability , nursing pension)
  6. Transport (including travel cancellation, luggage)
  7. Liability

In April 2011, according to the then operator IIRFP, five million data records were stored across all insurance branches. The consumer advice center assumed nine million entries, four million people and five million vehicles.

Entries about private health insurances are not saved; the system of the insured person survey exists here .

Self-disclosure

According to the GDPR, anyone can request information about the data stored about them annually free of charge.

Recording of records

Data records are created preventively in suspicious cases or, for example, in the case of life insurance . The person who decides whether or not to open a case has a great deal of responsibility here. The risks are reported according to a point system. Points are awarded, for example, if someone makes use of their legal protection insurance several times in a year or if someone is involved, but also, for example, is a witness in a traffic accident in which there is a suspicion that the accident was fabricated .

If the suspicious factors assessed with points with regard to possible insurance fraud or abuse of a reported insured event exceed a certain threshold value (which is specific for the insurance line of business), an entry is made in the HIS. This entry is made in coded form so that the HIS entry cannot be used to identify a specific person.

The following facts are reported to the HIS:

  • atypical claims frequency,
  • special consequences of damage,
  • aggravated risks,
  • Abnormalities in the event of a claim,
  • Completed life and occupational disability insurance.

“Atypical claims frequency” is understood to mean an extraordinary accumulation of claims over a certain period of time. The parameters are weighted differently in the various insurance lines. In the case of legal expenses insurance, for example, it is assumed that four or more insured events within a period of twelve calendar months are exceptional.

If a certain amount of damage is exceeded, for example vehicle damage is reported under "special consequences of damage", which is fictitiously settled on the basis of an expert opinion or a cost estimate. Be reported to the persons involved in a case of damage involved if "unusual circumstances of the loss to" picture or scope are reported to the HIS. The respective clerk decides on the report on the basis of criteria that define differently weighted fraud-prone anomalies. According to the GDV, most of the points have been confirmed by the jurisprudence as suitable reference criteria. This is to prevent gang-type fraud of so-called "car bumbers".

"Aggravated risks" are to be understood as dangerous professions such as scaffolders and explosives experts or significant previous illnesses. People with these characteristics are reported to the HIS, whereby the previous illness or the relevant occupation itself is not reported.

In the HIS, life insurance sums over 100,000 euros and disability pensions over 9,000 euros per year are recorded preventively regardless of suspicion. The aim is to identify and avoid so-called overinsurance . One speaks of overinsurance when the customer has a reduced interest in avoiding the insured event through caution and prevention due to the amount of the agreed pension.

Once recorded, data records are deleted after five years. The storage period is extended if a new report is received before the period expires.

use

The actual user of the system is an insurance company (in technical terms abbreviated as "VU"), to which the three most important actions (business transactions) are available:

  1. Message - the CC makes an entry in the system.
  2. Information - the CC searches for entries in the system.
  3. Deletion - the VU deletes a (self-created) entry from the system.

Of the three actions, the information is actually the most economically relevant and, as a result, the most used action. However, since the entries can only come from insurance companies, most insurance companies also try to report their own incidents and thus make their own contribution to the completeness of the entire database and thus to increasing the economic benefit of using the system.

If the information entered matches one or more entries, the user can see the insurance company from which the matching data records originate and can contact these insurers to exchange data directly. The HIS or GDV has nothing to do with this data exchange .

The more susceptible to fraud an insurance line of business, the more carefully the relevant data is collected. The key data on reported vehicle thefts, for example, are always entered. Legal protection insurers also use the information from the HIS for themselves in order to rule out disproportionately high risk risks.

criticism

According to critics, the file is a blacklist of people who an affiliated insurance company considers to be a particularly high risk.

Critics criticize the system for reasons of data protection law and have awarded a Big Brother Award 2006 in the categories “Consumer Protection” and “Audience Award”.

  • It is criticized that data are collected without the knowledge of those affected. Here people can be registered in a pre-pot without their knowledge until a certain threshold is torn. Information is only sent to the person concerned from this threshold.
  • Insurance companies that find a "hit" when comparing the data with the coded data are not forced to contact the insurance company that posted the data record. Under certain circumstances, this may result in applicants being rejected unjustifiably because the coding provides the same result as with a suspicious insured person. More and more agents and brokers are therefore making use of the possibility of a prior inquiry in order to bypass an entry.

swell

  1. ↑ informa-his.de start page. Retrieved April 16, 2017 .
  2. ↑ Who is informa HIS GmbH? Retrieved April 16, 2017 .
  3. ↑ a b c HIS information brochure of the GDV (PDF; 706 kB) ( Memento from October 6, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ How much data is stored in the HIS? ( Memento from January 13, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  5. ↑ Yumpu.com: Insurers' information system (HIS) - consumer information center. Retrieved March 19, 2019 .
  6. ↑ General Association of the German Insurance Industry : The information and information system (HIS) of the insurance industry. April 1, 2011, accessed August 3, 2012 .
  7. ↑ Elke Dolle-Helms: Insurance database - on the black list. Süddeutsche Zeitung , November 17, 2006, accessed on October 3, 2010 .
  8. ^ HIS information page at GDV , accessed on September 14, 2010

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