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The Cover Note

Insurance broker fact-find and statement of suitability under the 2025 Code: an evidence checklist

AAoibhe7 Nov 20265 min read
The Cover Note

When the Central Bank inspected retail intermediaries in 2024, the two weakest documents in the file were the fact-find and the statement of suitability. Fact-finds were too thin, especially where the client was buying again. Statements of suitability were generic templates with the name swapped.

Since 24 March 2026, those two documents sit at the centre of the Consumer Protection Code 2025. This post sets out what the Code actually requires of each one, as a checklist you can run against any client file. It is about the evidence, not the advice. The advice is yours. The file has to show how you got there.

What the Code asks for

Three regulations in the Consumer Protection Regulations 2025 do most of the work.

Regulation 16 covers the fact-find. Before you offer, recommend, arrange or provide a financial service, you must gather and record enough information about the consumer to give a professional service, appropriate to the product they are asking for.

Regulation 17 covers the suitability assessment. You must assess and document whether the product meets the client's needs and objectives, whether the client is likely to be able to meet the cost on an ongoing basis, whether they can financially bear the risks, and whether the product fits their attitude to risk.

Regulation 18 covers the statement of suitability. Before you provide or arrange the product, you must prepare, sign and date a written statement of why it is suitable, and give it to the client.

Most small business clients count as consumers under the 2025 Code, including companies under a 5 million euro turnover test. The full rule, including the group test, is in our earlier post, linked in the Sources. One exemption is worth knowing: a genuine execution-only instruction, where the client names the product and the insurer with no help from you, sits outside these requirements under Regulation 19.

The fact-find: what to gather and record

The Code's own list is short. The information must cover:

  • the client's needs and objectives

  • their personal circumstances

  • their financial situation

  • their attitude to risk, where relevant

  • any sustainability preferences, where relevant

"Where relevant" does real work. Only information relevant to the suitability assessment is required, and a commercial combined policy does not need the same fact-find as a pension. But "not relevant" should be a decision the file shows, not a gap the file has.

Three working rules are easy to miss.

Ask the client to confirm the fact-find is accurate. The Code says the firm must endeavour to have the consumer certify the information they provided.

If the client refuses to give the information, you must tell them you cannot offer, recommend, arrange or provide the service. That refusal, and your answer, belong on the file too.

Date everything. An undated fact-find cannot show it came before the advice.

At renewal: ask what has changed

Before further business, you must ask the client whether anything material has changed, record any changes, and record it when nothing has changed. A renewal placed on last year's fact-find with no note is exactly the pattern the Central Bank criticised in 2024: subsequent-product fact-finds were the weakest of all.

The cheapest sentence in compliance is the renewal note that says "client confirmed no material change", dated and kept.

The statement of suitability: what it must contain

Regulation 18 is specific. The statement must be:

  • prepared before you provide or arrange the cover, not after

  • signed and dated

  • given to the client on paper or another durable medium, which in practice usually means email

  • built on reasons, not conclusions: why this product, for this client, using the facts from their fact-find, covering needs and objectives, personal circumstances and financial situation

  • opened with the prescribed notice, word for word:

Important Notice - Statement of Suitability. This is an important document which sets out the reasons why the product(s) or service(s) offered or recommended is/are considered suitable, or the most suitable, for your particular needs, objectives and circumstances.

If you explained the product orally, a record of that explanation goes in or with the statement. Where relevant, the statement must also outline how the product's risk profile, and any guarantee attached to it, lines up with the client's attitude to risk.

Generic wording is the specific failure the Central Bank named in 2024. If a paragraph could be pasted into any client's letter unchanged, it is not reasons.

Where files fail inspection

The Central Bank's May 2024 letter to retail intermediaries, written under the old Code, reads like a preview of every inspection since. The failures it named:

  • fact-finds not detailed enough, particularly for subsequent products

  • generic statement of suitability templates

  • missing signatures and dates on fact-finds and suitability documents

  • out-of-date client information relied on for new business

  • records that could not be retrieved in a timely manner

The same letter praised the firms that got it right: statements that were bespoke and easy to read, a second person signing off the file against an internal checklist, and notes encouraging clients to review their cover regularly. None of that is exotic. It is a checklist, done every time.

Making it repeatable

None of this is judgement. It is the record of the judgement. The broker still reads the risk, chooses the market and advises the client. What inspections test is whether the gathering, the recording and the sign-off happen on every file, and whether the evidence can be found months later, by someone who did not write it.

That is the layer software can carry. Aoibhe gathers the details as they arrive across email, WhatsApp, web chat and web forms, cites the brokerage's own documents, prepares the drafts and routes the work for review. The suitability decision, and the statement that records it, stay with the broker. The point is not a different process. It is the same process, with nothing living only in someone's head.

Sources

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