[GRTV] Two main challenges see $3 billion annual premium opportunity go begging

Farrow who is a consultant specialising in business risk and a former director of Financial Advice NZ says globally the area is not being tapped into.

She says traditionally, if advisers were trained in business risk the main focus was on companies with multiple shareholders. The complexities of putting in place buy and sell agreements and the risks of not getting it right made it too hard for many advisers.

She says since then a lot of work has been done working out the market sectors. By her reckoning there are 50,000 SMEs with multi-ownership structures in New Zealand but the vast majority of businesses are micro - one to five people and in most cases all revenue is being driven by the owner or founder of the company. In NZ this equates to about 450,000 enterprises which have a very different set of problems to larger companies. Farrow says the complexities of giving advice to micro-businesses are a lot lower than for SMEs.

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