I spent a couple of hours recently with the managing director of a large general insurance brokerage in Australia discussing various problems with their referral programmes to advisers offering life, health and other personal insurance advice. We have both worked on quite a few referral programmes and comparing those that work, with those that don’t work, here is our list of the main problems and what to do about them.

Do you think people today are sicker than they used to be just 50 years ago? If not, why are there more of them off work?

An evergreen theme is to ensure you do the basics well. Clients appreciate it when you make things easy for them. The struggle is how to achieve that when almost everyone seems intent on making insurance cover more complicated – insurers and regulators are just two.

Russell Hutchinson provides an example of why the policy wording of some income protection products should be changed.

While it seems that the only thing to talk about in the financial services industry is regulation if a client has consented to a discussion about risk then we had better remember to talk about their concerns. What kills you can often be different to what makes you disabled, but it is scarier, and in fact overlaps a great deal. Here are the numbers to tell us what a connected Kiwi will most likely have witnessed take the life of a friend or acquaintance.

An evergreen theme is to ensure you do the basics well. Clients appreciate it when you make things easy for them. The struggle is how to achieve that when almost everyone seems intent on making insurance cover more complicated – insurers and regulators are just two.

The quick approach to price comparison on life insurance is both entirely understandable, and dumb.

Getting clients to buy TPD can be a bit of a struggle. At least, to judge from the in-force premium statistics, at just $40 million premium out of more than $1.5 billion of in-force premium it is tiny.

Russell Hutchinson looks at the emergence of severity-based trauma cover and offers some ideas for advisers about how to use these products.

Just what does our insurance market look like compared to the rest of the world? Actually pretty darn good, but here is a comparison on a number of measures.

Everyone who has worked in life insurance for more than a few years knows that people hate talking about dying, but you must make them, to get them to think seriously about managing the financial consequences. Russell Hutcinson provides two strategies to tackle death.

Advisers cheerfully criticise the work of other advisers, but if they are all right then everyone in the adviser business is doing it wrong, and no-one can be trusted. That cannot literally be true. If that is the feeling consumers get then it will undermine a valuable common commodity which we all share: public trust in the idea of getting advice.

Russell Hutchinson takes issue with the Australian regulators view that insurance policy churn is leading to higher lapse rates across the Tasman. He says there are other issues at play that the regulator needs to consider.

Changes to CPD training requirements create problems for insurance companies and advisers. Russell Hutchinson explains why.