The bank requires the insurance. It does not choose the insurer
No French bank will release mortgage funds without borrower insurance, the "assurance emprunteur". The contract repays the bank if the borrower dies or suffers a total and irreversible loss of autonomy, and it normally covers long-term incapacity for work and invalidity as well. It protects the bank first and your family second, and in practice it is non-negotiable for a residential loan.
What is negotiable is where the contract comes from. At signing, the bank proposes its own group policy. You are entitled to present another insurer instead, a mechanism called "délégation d'assurance", and the bank may not raise your loan rate or alter its terms because you insure elsewhere.
Until 2022, that freedom came wrapped in deadlines and anniversary dates. The Lemoine law removed them.
The Lemoine law: switch at any time, without fees
The loi Lemoine has applied since 1 June 2022 to new loan offers and since 1 September 2022 to all existing loans. It concerns mortgage loans taken out by private individuals to finance a property used as a home, or for mixed residential and professional use.
Three changes matter. You can cancel and replace your borrower insurance at any point in the life of the loan, free of charge, with no anniversary date to wait for. The bank must answer a substitution request within ten working days, and any refusal must be justified in writing. And where the insured amount is no more than €200,000 per person and the loan is repaid before the insured turns 60, no medical questionnaire may be asked at all.
The law also shortened the "right to be forgotten": five years after the end of treatment for cancer or hepatitis C, with no relapse, the illness no longer has to be declared.
Equivalent cover: the one condition that counts
The bank has a single legitimate ground for refusing your new contract: the cover is not equivalent to what it requires. Not the insurer's name, not the price, not the commission it loses.
Equivalence is not a vague idea. Each bank selects its criteria from a national list agreed by the CCSF, the French financial sector's consultative committee: up to eleven criteria for death, invalidity and incapacity cover, plus up to four more if it demands loss-of-employment cover. Those criteria are set out on the standardised information sheet (the "fiche standardisée d'information") handed over with the loan offer. The share of the loan insured on each borrower, the "quotité", must match as well.
Most rejected files fail on one missing criterion. That is a paperwork problem, and it is avoidable.
What switching actually saves
A bank's group contract averages the risk across all its borrowers. An individual contract is priced on your own age, health, occupation and smoker status. For many borrowers, particularly younger ones in good health, the gap is wide. Borrower insurance is often the second-largest cost of a French mortgage after the interest itself.
The saving depends on your age, the capital outstanding and the years left to run; on long loans it often reaches several thousand euros. Compare honestly, though: look at the total cost over the remaining term and at what is actually covered, not just the monthly premium.
Sometimes the point is not the price at all but the cover. Some individual contracts insure back conditions and psychological illness without the restrictive hospitalisation clauses found in older group policies. Same budget, better protection.
Non-resident buyers: case by case
Many buyers on the Côte d'Azur do not live in France: British and other foreign purchasers financing a house in the Var, or French expatriates keeping a property here. Insurers examine non-resident files case by case. Country of residence, the currency of your income and the nature of the purchase all weigh in. Some companies decline non-residents outright; others look at the file properly.
The practical answer is to approach several insurers at once rather than accept the first refusal. We work in English (and Italian) every day, and we know which of the companies on our panel will genuinely consider a non-resident application.
Health histories follow the same logic. Where the Lemoine questionnaire exemption does not apply, the AERAS framework ("insuring and borrowing with an aggravated health risk") organises a deeper, multi-level review of the file instead of an automatic refusal. These files take longer; they are far from hopeless.
How ASSUDIRE handles the equivalence paperwork
ASSUDIRE is an independent brokerage at Port Fréjus, working since 2013 with around thirty insurers. On a substitution file, the work looks like this:
- we read the bank's standardised information sheet and list every equivalence criterion;
- we compare the market and keep only the contracts that meet each criterion, at the right quotité;
- we prepare the substitution request and send it to the bank;
- we track the ten-working-day deadline and answer any objection in writing.
The advice is free, and we reply within two working hours. Clients rate us 4.9 out of 5 on Google (24 reviews). Call +33 4 89 78 15 49, write to info@assudire.fr via the contact page, or book an appointment. To see who you will be dealing with, there is the team page; and once the purchase completes, we can quote your French home insurance too.