Every answer and its explanation appears here once you have finished the path. Each one then links to the matching glossary entry, where the concept is set out in full with its worked example.
1. An arguable tax position becomes a notified assessment with a fixed amount. What has changed from the insurance standpoint?
The nature: what is certain is no longer a risk but a debt, and transferring a debt for a premium means having it paid at a discount
An insurance contract bears on an event whose occurrence or amount is uncertain when the commitment is made, and certainty is not a feature of the contract but of the world: no wording gets around it. Between the two situations there are only a few months and a letter, and that is exactly what makes the boundary hard to see from inside. The price answer is that of a practitioner treating every difficulty as a rating variable, and it is the costliest reflex here. The one relying on the pending dispute is the most tempting and confuses uncertainty about the outcome with chance about an event that has already occurred and been notified: products may remain to deal with the dispute, but that is no longer the same conversation.
Glossary entry →2. The seller's fraud is the textbook case the product exists to handle, the insured's is irremediably outside cover. Where does the line run?
Between the party that suffers and the party that could cause: cover protecting someone from the consequences of their own decision changes that decision
If cover changes the buyer's decision enough, the loss stops being an accident and becomes a choice, and it is that tipping point and not the parties' morality that draws the line. It explains a great many exclusions that look arbitrary so long as one tries to memorize them one by one. The honesty answer is the one the vocabulary suggests and the module rejects explicitly: the dishonest seller is precisely who one insures against. The one separating civil from criminal fraud invents a legal boundary where the test is economic, and it would leave deliberate dishonesty insurable whenever it is not prosecuted.
Glossary entry →3. A file carries an administrative fine and the back taxes that go with it. What is the first task?
Separate what punishes from what repairs, before discussing price
The test is that what punishes is not insured and what repairs is, and one file very often carries both: the back taxes restore a sum owed, the fine deters a determinate person, and if that person can pass the burden to an insurer, the authority has worked for nothing. The answer starting with the applicable law is not wrong and comes second: national laws do not overlap exactly, some forbidding only criminal fines, and that research only means something once the separation is made. The two answers treating the file as a block lose either legitimate cover or the credibility of whoever asks for it.
Glossary entry →4. An exposure is declined because no data allows a distribution to be built and its correlation with the portfolio is unknown. What kind of decline is that, and what should the client be told?
A decline on measurement and not on nature: it can be worked on with data, and it moves, subjects refused twenty years ago being placed today
The module sets this fourth limit apart and asks that it not be confused with the three structural boundaries, chance, moral hazard and sanction. A decline on measurement can be worked on: bring data, bound the tail, document the correlation, and the market follows. Saying so changes what the client does with their time and money. The structural answer is the symmetrical error to the one the module most reproaches, presenting as impossible what was only a badly presented file. Nor is a commercial decline the right box, since it suggests another insurer would say yes today, which sends the client to three brokers for nothing.
Glossary entry →5. A bounded, measurable and lawful exposure is quoted at a premium the client considers excessive. What answer is honest?
That the question is whether the cost of the transfer is less than the value of the certainty bought, and that it belongs to the buyer
Answering uninsurable where the honest answer would be too expensive for what it is worth closes a discussion that should have happened, and the two answers look alike in their immediate effect without having remotely the same status. The decision belongs to the buyer because only the buyer knows what certainty is worth to them, and that is also what protects the adviser: they do not have to decide for the client, they have to ask the right question. Raising the retention does lower the premium, and it answers the wrong question, the headline price rather than the trade-off. Deferring to renewal postpones the same conversation by a year without changing it.
Glossary entry →