Q&A with Nadine Habbal, acting head of the Insurance Control Commission

ENAR

Lebanon’s insurance sector is highly fragmented, featuring extreme competition between small local players, bank-affiliate insurers, providers that are parts of multinational insurance giants, and—outside of the regulated sphere of commercial insurance companies—even quasi-insurers with competitive privileges that are categorized as mutual funds. The diverse and overpopulated sector, mired in opacity of companies, has not been able to achieve significant consolidation and has, for the last 30 years, rarely been able to find a unified voice that would have enabled to address public concerns and deliver insurance as a public good. Throughout the last few decades, the need for an adequate insurance law has moreover loomed large over the disjointed industry. Frequently faced with greatly diverging opinions from within the insurance sector and having to tear down attitudinal walls of vested interest as part of challenges it encountered, the Insurance Control Commission (ICC) has, since the early 2000s, incrementally implemented increasingly