The number of EU rules has grown sharply in recent years: from about twelve major legislative files in 2012 to almost seventy in 2025. European insurers also have to deal with one of the strictest and most complex regulatory packages in the world. The combination of financial rules (such as Solvency II), sustainability reporting and digitisation legislation leads to an accumulation of obligations that sometimes overlap.
Regulatory pressure costs time, money and capacity
The regulatory burden costs insurers a lot of time, money and capacity. For example, excessive regulatory pressure means that companies can invest less in innovation, digitisation and customer-oriented improvements. Think of faster claims handling, better digital services or the development of new, affordable products. Insurance Europe therefore argues in a new paper for a broad package of simplifications.
Monitoring, compliance, and reporting
The current requirements under Solvency II, IRRD, anti-money laundering rules and international tax standards often overlap. By applying smarter reporting and proportionality, insurers can free up large amounts of capacity. As examples, IE mentions the deletion of Q4 reports, the further streamlining of the SFCR, less frequent AML reviews and more room for proportional supervision. IE also argues for the introduction of a so-called 'stop-the-clock' mechanism at the IRRD to improve the enforceability of the directive. IE also suggests a review of the frequency of EU-wide stress tests.
Distribution and information
Due to laws and regulations, customers now often receive too much, overlapping information. This makes the purchase process long and unclear. IE suggests not adding additional questions to suitability and appropriateness testing and limiting customer information to what is truly relevant to the customer. And to use more visual and understandable customer information (instead of long documents).
Sustainability regulations
The combination of CSRD, ESRS, Taxonomy, SFDR and Solvency II creates overlapping sustainability obligations, which costs insurers a lot of time. You can avoid this by including a 10% materiality threshold in the EU Taxonomy and simplifying the Taxonomy reporting templates. But also by streamlining the SFDR, CSRD and the Taxonomy in order to avoid duplicate reporting.
Digitalisation and innovation
AI legislation, GDPR, DORA, and the Cyber Resilience Act regularly overlap. IE therefore argues in favour of removing double requirements between and allowing insurers to rely on EU-recognised cloud certifications. The introduction of shared audits by 'European supervisors' (instead of separately per supervisor) also results in less legal uncertainty and leads to lower costs.
Data protection
The GDPR remains leading, but some parts are not proportional and too heavy for the actual risk and therefore limit innovation. Provide a clear explanation of what a risk-based approach to international data transfers means. Introduce a clear legal basis for the processing of health data, so that insurers are not dependent on divergent national interpretations
Supervision and governance
Differences between countries and complex supervisory processes create uncertainty and high costs because member states apply European rules differently. IE proposes that a quantitative impact analysis should be carried out for every new measure. This leads to more consistent application of regulations within the EU. Also include long(er) review periods in guidelines to give the sector and regulators sufficient implementation time. Finally, IE calls for the abolition of national templates that lead to double reporting.