The government has said it would get rid of incentive structures in insurance and banking that drove poor customer outcomes.

Upfront commissions and overseas trips are top of the list.

Insurance commentator Russell Hutchinson said many advisers would feel they had been "put through the wringer", with Financial Markets Authority research last year into churn and now its report, with the Reserve Bank, into the sector.

It was not long ago that officials had defended the commission model as the Financial Services Legislation Amendment Bill was being developed. "Now commission is back in focus again."

How much a change in commission affected businesses would depend how long people had been in the industry, he said.

Those who had been advisers for a long time, with broad-based businesses and a range of revenue streams, might only need to introduce fees for some of the services they currently offered for nothing, he said.

But it would seriously affect those who were new with little infrastructure in place. "Any change to commission will affect the provision of advice, similar to how the investment advice industry works right now. It's hard to enter investment advice very young. It's hard to enter with a clean sheet and start out with one client. You typically have to join a bigger business and maybe that's what would happen. There's no doubt it would knock recruitment down for a period."

Adviser Jon-Paul Hale, of Willowgrove Consulting, said the optics on commission incentives were not good.

But he said insurers that did not pay high upfront commission still had to pay about a quarter of their premium income on acquisition costs.

In other countries cited in the report, insurers paid less in commission but more in business support costs for their adviser force.

"In the most part they pay a commission so they don't have to own and manage the infrastructure, we do."

If commission was structured advisers would still need a level of income that allowed them to be profitable, or they would leave the business, he said.

An alternative could be to pay commission at the beginning of a policy and then when advisers helped a client make a successful claim, he said.

Adviser Ron Flood said he thought most advisers would remain if commission structures changed, but agreed newer advisers would find it hard to run a sustainable business.