The Insurance Council of Australia (ICA) has raised “serious concerns” about plans to publish all information gathered under the Financial Sector (Collection of Data) Act. 

In its response to a discussion paper, ICA says the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority’s (APRA) “sweeping” proposal would expose commercially sensitive insurance material.

It argues consumers can gain reassurance that their policies will be honoured from “broad financial information about a particular insurer, not the exposure of detailed operational information to those that can take commercial advantage of it”.

The council says much of the information provided to APRA under the Act could be made public at an appropriate time, but release of some material cannot be “justified in terms of the public interest”.

Information collected by APRA under the Act includes insurer-level statistics aggregated across state, class and counterparty; insurer-level statistics at a class-of-business and state-by-state class-of-business level; and counterparty-level information or information specific to individual reinsurance treaties or sources of income.

ICA says members are also concerned that if data is made public shortly after it is presented to the regulator “there is the possibility that information would be published by APRA before it has been considered by a regulated entity’s board, and there are serious consequences in terms of listed insurers meeting their continuous disclosure obligations”.