About

WERTGARANTIE Group is a fast, straightforward and customer oriented insurance organisation domiciled in Germany: Since 1963, WERTGARANTIE has demonstrated how to be a successful insurer for consumer electronics, household appliances, bicycles and pets. Since its foundation the Group has grown across Europe and became a leader in its niche business of extended warranty and insurance. The Group has a compact but nevertheless highly effective legal team covering a broad spectrum of areas that plays an integral role in ‘making things happen, providing innovative solutions and enabling the business to grow profitably within the legal regulatory framework’, explains Torsten Hildebrand who is in charge of leading the team as the Group’s general counsel since 2017. He enjoys a vast experience in the field having more than 10 years of expertise in legal, regulatory and compliance matters in the insurance industry and leading teams. The legal team of WERTGARANTIE is handling the regulatory and corporate requirements impacting the Group. It is deeply involved in the business activities and has proved itself to be capable of overseeing legal support of distribution schemes and products resulting into six million customer relationships that the company possesses across Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Luxembourg, Switzerland and Belgium. Hildebrand mentions that compliance with the Solvency II directive especially the governance requirements as perhaps the foremost among the regulatory challenges faced by the team. In addition to the individual skills of the team’s lawyers the team itself is in the process of becoming familiar with and adopting legal technology and taking advantage of current trends to deal with standardised processes. Preferring not to single out specific team members as ‘all team members are contributing to the direction of the legal department and the direction of the organisation within their capacities’, Hildebrand mentions that in addition to compliance with Solvency II, the team’s greatest achievements since 2017 are re-organising the corporate structure of the Group, setting up and formalising a new support unit for the boards, identifying a panel of external lawyers for international business, ensuring company compliance to GDPR and implementing the Insurance Distribution Directive.