Is an email enough? When a cancellation, an amendment or a beneficiary designation is valid in writing

What does “in writing” mean under the Civil Code?

The Hungarian Civil Code (Ptk.) requires written form for cancelling an insurance contract: under Section 6:466 of the Civil Code, the parties may cancel a contract of indefinite duration in writing, to the end of the insurance period, with 30 days' notice, while the MTPL act (the Gfbt.) allows the policyholder to cancel in writing or – by agreement between the parties – electronically, so for MTPL an electronic route agreed with the insurer is also accepted on a statutory basis. Under Section 6:478(2) of the Civil Code, a beneficiary is designated or changed by a written statement addressed to the insurer and delivered to the insurer. What counts as written is set out in Section 6:7(3) of the Civil Code: a legal statement is also to be regarded as made in writing if it is communicated in a form suitable for retrieving its content unchanged and for identifying the person making it and the time it was made. Three conditions, then: the content can be retrieved, the person can be identified, and the time can be identified. A letter signed on paper meets all three. With an electronic statement, the question in every case is the second one: how does the insurer know that the email really came from you?

Email as a borderline case: what does case law say?

According to the opinion of the New Civil Code Advisory Board operating alongside the Curia (Hungary's supreme court), a statement made by email, text message or on a chat platform qualifies as written if it meets the three conditions, while a statement bearing an electronic signature under the eIDAS Regulation meets them “beyond doubt”. Practice, however, is not uniform: earlier case law did not regard a simple email as written, while more recent decisions have accepted it where communication between the parties had been conducted electronically from the outset and the statement had indisputably reached the addressee. From the client's point of view, one thing follows from this: whether a simple, unsigned email counts as written is open to challenge, and with a cancellation at the renewal date it is not wise to build on the outcome of a dispute. Insurers therefore specify in their own conditions which electronic routes they accept – and if a statement arrives by some other route, they assess it case by case or reject it. In doing so, the insurer is not acting in bad faith: it is managing its own risk, because a forged cancellation or change of beneficiary could cause it loss as well.

What do insurers accept? It depends on the conditions

Hungarian policy conditions typically recognise three electronic routes, in combinations that vary from insurer to insurer. The first is a signed statement, scanned or photographed, sent as an email attachment to the address specified by the insurer: several insurers' conditions expressly state that a policy may be cancelled by sending a scanned or electronically signed statement containing the cancellation to the insurer's email address. The second is an identified client portal or mobile app, where logging in identifies the person making the statement and the system logs the time – where such a route exists, it is typically the most reliable electronic route. The third is an electronic signature: a qualified or advanced electronic signature, or authentication based on identification through Ügyfélkapu (the Hungarian government's online client gateway). A cancellation typed into the body of an email without a signature is not sufficient under most conditions, or only if it comes from an identified email address recorded in the contract. Since this varies by insurer and by product, the answer is to be found in the policy, in the policy conditions or on the insurer's website – if the statement goes through me, I check this before it is sent.

Statement by statement: cancellation, amendment, beneficiary, claim notification

Cancellation is the strictest case: written form and a deadline at the same time, so here it is worth choosing the most reliable route and being able to prove that the statement reached the insurer – according to the guidance of the MNB (Hungary's central bank and financial supervisor), the cancellation must reach the insurer at least 30 days before the renewal date. The form of requests for amendment – sum insured, cover, method of premium payment, changes in personal details – is determined by the policy conditions; in Hungarian practice, some of these can also be handled by telephone or through the client portal, while others require a signed statement. Under the law, a beneficiary designation is a written statement delivered to the insurer – here the email route is particularly risky, because any error comes to light only when the insured event occurs, by which time it can no longer be corrected. The Civil Code does not prescribe written form for claim notification: insurers also accept claims via their claims line or online claims forms, and what matters here is not the form but the deadline and being able to prove it – as I wrote in the article on my role in a claim, the primary route for reporting is the insurer's claims line, and it is worth keeping the reference number of the report.

How to send it so that there is no dispute

The procedure I recommend as a broker: check in the policy conditions or on the insurer's website which route it accepts; print the statement, sign it, scan or photograph it legibly, and send it as an attachment to the address specified by the insurer – from the email address recorded in the contract; in the email, state the policy number and the renewal date; ask for confirmation, and if none arrives within a few days, phone the insurer and make a note of whom you spoke to; for statements subject to a deadline – cancellation at the renewal date, change of beneficiary – also send the statement by registered post with advice of delivery in addition to sending it electronically, because according to the MNB's advice this makes it possible to prove the dispatch and the arrival later. If you send the statement to me, I forward it in the form accepted by the insurer – but signing it, keeping to the deadline and checking the conditions remain on your side, as I also described in the article on how I work. The same logic applies to changing broker: revoking the mandate and giving a new one require a signed statement; you can read about this in the article on changing broker.

What to do in practice: check in the policy conditions which electronic route is accepted; send a signed, scanned statement, not just the text of an email; send it from the email address recorded in the contract, quoting the policy number; ask for confirmation and keep it; for statements subject to a deadline, also send a registered letter with advice of delivery; and start all this at least 45 days before the renewal date.