Terms of Business Agreement (TOBA) – Consumer 1st February 2017

Definition of Consumer and Non-Consumer

A consumer is any natural person who is acting for purposes which are outside his trade or profession whereas a commercial customer is a customer who is non-consumer.

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 in particular, we would like to draw your attention to the “IMPORTANT INFORMATION” section. 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 £5,000,000 in connection with any one event or connected events.

Who regulates us

The Financial Conduct Authority is the independent watchdog that regulates financial services. Nimmos Insurance Brokers is a trading style of Nimmos of Clacton Limited which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority. Our FCA Register number is 306290 and you can check our status at www.fca.gov.uk/register or by contacting the FCA on 0800 111 6768.
Our permitted business includes advising, arranging, dealing in and assisting with the placing and administration of all types of General Insurance policies.

Confidentiality and Data Protection

We will treat all your personal information as private and confidential to us and anyone else involved in the normal course of arranging and administering your insurance, even when you are no longer a customer. We will not give anyone else any personal information except on your instructions or authority, or where we are required to do so by law, or by virtue of our regulatory requirements. We may use information we hold about you to provide information to you about other products and services, which we feel may be appropriate to you. Under the Data Protection Act 1998 you have the right to see personal information about you that we hold in our records. If you have any queries please write to us at our usual office address.

Our Service

We are an independent insurance intermediary, who acts on our customers’ behalf in arranging insurance we will advise you separately prior to the commencement of each contract if this alters. Our services include: advising you on your insurance needs; arranging your insurance cover with insurers to meet your requirements; and helping you with any ongoing changes you have to make. As part of our service, we will assist you with any claim you need to make and tell you what your responsibilities are in relation to making claims.
If you mislay your policy at any time, we will issue a replacement policy document, if you request it.
Whose products we offer
We usually offer advice from a range of insurers, representing a fair analysis of the market, however, under certain circumstances we may only deal with a limited panel, or single insurer. We will confirm, for each individual policy we provide you with, the basis of our advice. In certain circumstances we will use the services of another intermediary to place your insurance and in these circumstances we will state the name of the intermediary we use and the name of the risk carrier in the form of “underwritten by”.
The service we will provide you with
We will advise and make a recommendation for you after we have assessed your demands and needs. Our advice will be confirmed in a demands & needs and suitability statement, giving reasons for our recommendation. In respect of Optional Policies offered with car and home insurance you will not receive advice or a recommendation from us and you will then need to make your own choice about how to proceed.

What you will pay for our services

We usually receive a commission from the insurer with whom we place your business. We also receive commission for arranging finance agreements for the payment of premiums and we may also receive commission or fees for passing introductions to other professionals. In addition, we normally make the following charges to cover the administration of your insurance:
Arranging new policies, mid term adjustments & renewals £15
Mid term cancellations and other refunds are refunded NET of commission. We may, in addition, charge a £15 administration fee.
Replacement/duplicate certificates or cover notes £10
Personal lines/consumer policies cancelled during the ‘Right to Cancel’ period will be subject to an administration charge of £15, in addition to the premium charged by the insurer for the period of cover provided.

Occasionally we may arrange a policy on which we earn no commission (a ‘net-premium policy’) and in these cases we will advise you of the arrangement fee before you take the policy out. Specific charges, which apply to individual policies will be advised to you at the quotation stage, prior to inception or renewal of the policy. The specific charge and purpose of any additional charges will always be advised to you in advance.
Prior to the conclusion of each insurance contract, or upon renewal, we will remind commercial policyholders of their right to be advised of the level of commission which we receive from underwriters. You are entitled, at any time, to request information regarding any commission which we may have received as a result of placing your insurance business.

What to do if you have a complaint

Our aim is to provide a first class service, however, if you wish to register a complaint, please contact us by writing to David Knott, Nimmos Insurance Brokers, 82 Station Road, Clacton on Sea, Essex. CO15 1SP or by phone Telephone 01255 426426, by fax 01255 423674 or by email [email protected].

Where a complaint arises we will, wherever possible, endeavour to resolve the matter by no later than the close of business the third working day following receipt. If this is not possible, to enable us to remedy the situation in a speedy and efficient manner, we have a documented, formal complaints procedure, details of which are shown below.

1) We will acknowledge your complaint promptly, to reassure you that we will be dealing with the issue as a matter of urgency, giving you the details of who will be handling the matter in our office, and details of the service of the Financial Ombudsman Service, where this applies.

2) In the event that your complaint relates to activities or services provided by another party, we will advise you of this in writing giving the reasons for our decision, and ensure that your complaint is promptly forwarded to the appropriate party, in writing.

3) We will aim to make a final response to you as soon as is practicable, and keep you reasonably informed as to progress. We anticipate that we will be able to provide a substantive response to most complaints within eight weeks.

4) By the end of eight weeks from receipt of your complaint, we will issue you with our final response, or issue a response that gives the reasons for the delay and indicates when we will be able to provide a final response. If you are dissatisfied with our response, or the delay at this time, you will have a period of Six months in which you can refer the matter to the Financial Ombudsman Service, whose details are shown below.

When we provide our final response letter, we will endeavour to ensure that we have taken into consideration any financial losses, or material inconvenience you may have suffered. If we do not feel that your complaint is justified, we will advise you of the reasons for our decision and we will also advise how you may pursue the complaint if you remain dissatisfied.

The Financial Ombudsman Service provides consumers with a free, independent service for resolving disputes with financial firms.
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 9 123 (free for mobile-phone users paying monthly charge for calls to No’s starting 01 or 02)and their address is:

Financial Ombudsman Service
Exchange Tower
Harbour Exchange Square
London
E14 9SR
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 to Cancel 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.

Information on how we treat Payments You make to Us

Under the terms of our agreements with the Insurance companies with whom we place business, we normally receive premiums you pay to us as Agent of the Insurer. In certain circumstances you may have the additional protection of insurance companies accepting that monies paid to us are treated as being received by them (Risk Transfer) please ask for details. All insurance premiums you pay to us are protected in a Statutory Trust Client Account until we pay insurers. We do not pay any interest on premiums held by us in the course of arranging and administering your insurance.
PLEASE SEE THE LAST PAGE FOR IMPORTANT INFORMATION REGARDING YOUR DUTIES, WARRANTIES AND CONDITIONS PRECEDENT ON POLICIES.

Are we covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS)?

We are covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS). You may be entitled to compensation from the FSCS if we cannot meet our obligations. This depends on the type of business and the circumstances of the claim. Full details and further information are available from the FSCS. The FSCS is the UK’s statutory fund of last resort for customers of authorised financial services firms, like us. The FSCS can pay compensation if an authorised firm is unable or likely to be unable to pay claims against it, usually because it has gone out of business or is insolvent.
Insurance advising and arranging is covered for 90% of the claim, without an upper limit. For compulsory insurances (for example, motor insurance and employers’ liability insurance), insurance advising and arranging is covered for 100% of the claim, without an upper limit. Further information about compensation scheme arrangements is available from the FSCS.

Payment Options

We normally accept payment by guaranteed cheque or Visa, Mastercard or Maestro cards. You may be able to spread your payments through insurers’ instalment schemes or a credit scheme, which we have arranged with an established insurance premium finance provider. We will give you full information about your payment options and the appropriate finance agreement when we discuss your insurance in detail. Please note that we only use Close Premium Finance for the provision of premium finance facilities.
Please Note: Your policy cover will cease if you fail to keep up payments on an instalment agreement or premium finance facility related to it.

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.

Information on how we treat Payments You make to Us

IMPORTANT INFORMATION -CONSUMERS

Your duty to give information

When applying for or amending your insurance policy, we and / or your insurer will ask a number of questions to assess the risk prior to agreeing cover. It is your duty to ensure that you answer all questions raised by insurers or us honestly and reasonably. These questions are designed to enable us or the insurer to obtain a comprehensive picture of the nature of the risk to be insured, and only by asking such questions and receiving answers which are given honestly and with reasonable care, can we or the insurer be in a position to offer terms which are designed to meet your demands and needs.

This reason why this is vital and extremely important is that if you fail to tell us or the insurer something when asked, or, if you answer carelessly or act deliberately or recklessly in making misrepresentations when answering questions, your policy may leave you with no insurance protection; insurers may not pay a part or all of your claim and may cancel your policy. You may find it difficult to re-arrange cover because you did not tell an insurer everything when asked, and you will have to disclose this fact when you reapply for insurance.

FAILURE TO ANSWER QUESTIONS HONESTLY AND REASONABLY, WHEN ASKED, MAY LEAVE YOU WITH NO COVER AND A CLAIM NOT PAID.
WARNING

Warranties and Conditions Precedent

Your policy contains a number of WARRANTIES and CONDITIONS PRECEDENT. These are strict terms which you must comply with word for word, otherwise the insurer might not pay any claims and might cancel your policy from the start, even if there is no connection between a breach of these terms and the cause of the loss.

Failure to comply with these terms may leave you with no insurance cover and your claim not being paid!

An insurance warranty is not a good thing, it does not mean that it is a guarantee of something; it typically means that you must comply with terms in order that your insurance protection remains operative.

Conditions Precedent: Some conditions do impose a responsibility on you to have done something or completed something before a certain section of the policy will operate. If you do not comply with the conditions stated, cover will not be in place.

FAILURE TO COMPLY MAY LEAVE YOU WITH NO COVER AND A CLAIM NOT PAID.
IMPORTANT

Warranties are not always referred to as such within a policy and schedule. They may be referred to as conditions, endorsements, special terms as well as warranties.

It is important that you look out for these and if you have any doubt about a particular statement, please ask us for advice.

FAILURE TO COMPLY WITH THESE MAY LEAVE YOU WITHOUT ANY COVER IN THE EVENT OF A CLAIM AND THE CLAIM MAY NOT BE PAID.