Darren Gannon, head of Newpark Financial Services, said the recent trend of mortgage brokers switching to insurance advice was "devaluing the quality of the adviser market".

"We disagree with the PAA [Professional Advisers Association]. We don't think mortgage brokers should be giving insurance advice. It's the bottom half of mortgage brokers that are trying to sell insurance to top their incomes up," Gannon told the roundtable. "The bulk of those mortgage brokers have aligned themselves with one carrier, which is a joke."

He said the best mortgage brokers "want to specialise" in their own field, likewise with life and investment advisers.

Ron Flood, head of the Life Brokers Association (LBA), also said many mortgage brokers "don't have the expertise" to sell life insurance.

"One of the problems with mortgage broker [insurance] advice is that a lot of them use the short-form applications that don't have the full information," Flood said. "Time and again I've come across clients where there's been material non-disclosure on a mortgage broker application."

However, Peter Leitch, PAA president, said capable mortgage brokers were well-equipped to make the switch to selling insurance.

"We've seen that mortgage brokers, by virtue of what they do, are very procedurally driven. Insurance advisers traditionally haven't been," Letich said.

He said mortgage brokers could easily adapt those processes to life insurance with proper training.

"As long as those people understand what their core competency is, as long as they are capable of giving advice and can support insurance services as well as mortgage services, I don't have a problem," Leitch said.

He said mortgage brokers would also benefit by joining a professional body to mix with experienced insurance advisers.

An edited version of the insurance roundtable was published in the September issue of ASSET.