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Effective this Thursday (11), the New Insurance Law, Law No. 15.040/2024, standardizes contracts, creates deadlines to accept proposals and pay claims, makes automatic cancellation without notice harder, and increases transparency, consumer protection, and governance in life and collective insurance, along with stricter rules for customer service.
The Law No. 15.040/2024, known as the New Insurance Law, comes into effect this Thursday (11) and establishes a specific legal framework for private insurance in Brazil, largely replacing the scattered rules of the Civil Code. With the new legislation, the sector will operate with more detailed, predictable contracts aligned with modern insurance market practices.
The regulation standardizes contracts, sets deadlines for proposal and claims analysis, prevents automatic cancellations without notice in various situations, and reinforces transparency in the relationship between insurers, brokers, and consumers, especially in life and personal injury insurance, both individual and collective. The stated goal is to enhance consumer protection and provide greater legal security to all parties involved in insurance operations.
Clearer Contracts and Mandatory Glossary
The New Insurance Law requires insurers to include a glossary explaining the technical terms used in each policy to facilitate the understanding of the insured.
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The contract must clearly state the start and end dates of the coverage, the description of the covered and excluded risks, the premium amount, risk locations, beneficiaries, and the responsible broker.
The intent is to reduce doubts, avoid ambiguous interpretations, and bring legal language closer to the consumer’s daily life.
Defined Deadlines to Accept Proposals and Deliver the Policy
The legislation sets maximum deadlines for insurers’ responses. The company will have 25 days to accept or reject the insurance proposal, counted from the receipt of the necessary data and documents.
If there is no response within that period, the contract will be considered automatically accepted.
After that, the insurer will have up to 30 days to deliver the policy to the client, either in physical or digital form. In practice, the consumer gains predictability and will no longer be left indefinitely waiting for coverage confirmation.
Payment and Cancellation Can’t Surprise the Insured
In terms of insurance payment, the New Insurance Law prevents the automatic cancellation of the policy for non-payment without prior notification to the insured, except in cases of single premium or the first installment, where termination remains immediate if payment is not made.
The rule aims to curb silent cancellations and force insurers to notify the client before suspending the contracted protection.
Stricter Rules for Claims Analysis
When reporting a claim, the insured must follow the insurer’s guidelines and provide the required documents.
The law establishes two central deadlines: up to 30 days for the insurer to inform whether the coverage will be recognized and another 30 days to pay the compensation after acknowledging the client’s right.
Delays in these deadlines incur a penalty of 2 percent, monetary correction, and legal interest. Delays in analysis or payment will now have objective financial costs for the company, encouraging faster decisions.
Limit on Requests for Additional Documents
The New Insurance Law also limits the number of requests for additional documentation during the claims regulation.
The insurer may request additional documents only once for automobile insurance, once for insurance of up to 500 minimum wages, and up to two times for other types.
This regulation seeks to prevent the successive sending of new documents from being used as a strategy to delay the payment of compensation.
Compensation Separate from Salvage Expenses
Another significant change is the separation between the amount of compensation and the amount allocated to containment and salvage expenses, used to prevent further damage.
The policy must distinctly indicate each of these limits.
One amount cannot be used in place of the other, and exhausting one does not authorize the use of the other as compensation. The goal is to ensure specific resources for both repairing the damage and covering emergency measures.
Risk Increase Must Be Reported by the Insured
The insured now has an explicit obligation to immediately report any fact that increases the risk covered by the insurance, such as significant changes in the use of the asset or the insured’s behavior.
If the increase is intentional or deliberately omitted, the client may lose the right to compensation and may even be required to reimburse amounts to the insurer.
When the risk is still considered bearable, the company may propose an adjustment to the premium amount. The logic is to align price, risk, and behavior, disincentivizing fraud and omissions.
New Rules for Life and Personal Injury Insurance
The law also updates the terminology of the products. The former personal insurance is now referred to as life insurance, and personal accident insurance is now called personal injury insurance. The insured may freely indicate and replace beneficiaries, except in cases of cohabitation or when the beneficiary is a creditor of the insured.
If there is no indication, half of the insured capital will go to the spouse and half to the heirs, and in case of separation, the payment will go to the partner.
The waiting period must be compatible with the utility of the insurance. If the covered event occurs during the waiting period, the insurer must refund the contributions made.
Preexisting diseases can only be used as a reason to deny coverage if there is no waiting period stipulated in the policy.
The insurance capital will not be part of the inheritance and cannot be used to pay the insured’s debts.
In practice, the New Insurance Law seeks to provide families with more clarity about who receives the compensation and under what conditions the payment may be denied.
Group Insurance Gains Consumer Protection Rules
In collective life or personal injury insurance, any change that harms consumers can only be made with the approval of at least 75 percent of the insured.
For individual contracts renewed for more than ten years, the insurer must notify 90 days in advance whenever it wants to change significant conditions.
Amid so many changes, do you believe the New Insurance Law truly makes contracts fairer for consumers, or does it still leave gaps that need to be addressed in the future?
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