Russell Hutchinson surveys the market to see who is recruiting advisers - and makes some startling findings.

Russell Hutchinson argues advisers need to adopt a new "normal" for life insurance cover, rather than just selling the most expensive policy.

It is horses for courses, the saying goes. Conventional wisdom is that after spending many exhausting hours going through all the information required to apply for a home loan the consumer is exhausted, and wishes simply to leave the chamber of horrors that the plush interview-room has become. For many people any review of their financial affairs leaves them anxious, and they need a good meal and a drink to recover from it.

Most consumers don't really understand what a good insurance adviser does - so it doesn't matter what letters are placed after your name, what matters is how you explain to them what you do. This brings us back to an old industry adage: "they must know how much you care before they care how much you know".

I always thought selling insurance to people through their employers was the flimsiest of propositions - why would anyone talk to you about insurance in the work café, with their mates hanging around for the ‘convenience' of paying for the same thing they can buy in the plush, private, offices of the bank for the same price?

I always thought selling insurance to people through their employers was the flimsiest of propositions - why would anyone talk to you about insurance in the work café, with their mates hanging around for the ‘convenience' of paying for the same thing they can buy in the plush, private, offices of the bank for the same price?

If you've been selling insurance for more than 20 years - and the chances are you have - then you may recall an earlier, happier era when loadings were rare and summer start in November.

There is plenty of talk about advice-level compliance, and to be fair there is quite a lot of regulation of product providers (which we shall turn to later) but most of the law and regulation is about the adviser.

Checking out the draft standards for risk management proved to be more interesting than I thought. Expecting a quick ticket to the land of nod I was therefore pleasantly surprised at how useful they were. You should give them a read too.

In various places and at various times we have seen calls to manage some of the components of what goes into the insurance you sell or buy. These are often motivated with the best of intentions – say consumer protection – yet are almost equally often wrong-headed, or in doing some good do some wrong.

Swapping morbid stories and statistics is a reliably good way of having a conversation with an insurance person.

Russell Hutchinson looks at the vexed question of what insurance advisers who are RFAs can do with clients with whole-of-life policies.

Rationing is alive and well in healthcare. It isn’t even that controversial these days: everyone accepts that there isn’t enough money for everything we want. It just gets messy when we disagree over where the money should be spent.

Do you still remember how to sell? You would be forgiven if you had forgotten, fed on a constant diet of compliance fears and ‘solutions’.

At a conference recently I had someone challenge me when I linked savings and insurance together closely.

When insurance is seen as something very ordinary, mundane, and ho hum – then it becomes what we dread: a commodity, an afterthought, and forgotten. When it’s seen as central to a client’s core values and goals in life they become engaged in the process and outcomes are always better.