Conflicted conduct in the insurance industry

Page last updated: 18 Jul 2018

Our role is to promote fair, efficient and transparent financial markets. As part of this objective, we are interested in the outcomes for consumers when they receive insurance advice. There are various potentially adverse consequences of poor advice on life insurance. However, many of these may not be immediately visible but can have serious implications for consumers in the future.

In our previous work, we focused on Authorised Financial Advisers (AFAs) and Registered Financial Advisers (RFAs) because they generally sell more than one brand of life insurance. This thematic review investigated how QFEs mitigate risks through their operational policies and procedures when selling replacement policies. QFEs are usually large financial organisations, such as banks, insurers and fund managers, that employ a variety of advisers to sell their products. There are approximately 21,500 QFE advisers operating in New Zealand.