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.

I hear all the time amongst insurance people that insurance is about paying claims. I hear brokers talk about it, and I hear clients doubt it. I hear company managers talk all the time about the claims they pay - but we talk less often about the claims we don't pay.

If your broking service looks the same as everyone else's, then your results will as well. There is a reason that most people are in the middle - it's because it is safe there.

We get into a lot of trouble with shortcuts.

Surely everybody knows that standard fire and general cover for your home "doesn't cover flooding here!" Doesn't everybody know that total and permanent disablement doesn't cover the loss of only one leg? Doesn't everybody know that six months business interruption insurance isn't enough?

Whether you read that headline as a good thing or a bad thing may have something to do with how old you are.