Advisers represent less than half of insurance market

Industry commentator Russell Hutchinson, of Quotemonster and Chatswood Consulting, has released statistics indicating that financial advisers likely account for between 40% and 45% of new life insurance sales.

He said that number was arrived at by first deducting from total industry sales all the business from companies that did not deal with advisers, such as BNZ and Cigna.

Then bank business was removed, a calculation made more accurate by recently-published ANZ data that showed far less of its business was being done by advisers than had previously been estimated.

“With OnePath it had been estimated that 50% of the product was from the bank but we discovered it was actually more like 84%.”