Australia’s largest dealer group, Professional Investment Services (PIS), says banning life insurance commissions will impact many boutique licensees and may even threaten their survival.
PIS MD Grahame Evans says the dealer group supports some changes under the Future of Financial Advice (FOFA) reforms, but opposes some changes such as the ban on insurance commissions.
“The FOFA changes are not all to the group’s liking,” he said. “Opt-in and the banning of commission on insurance products inside super are all areas which cause concern to the group.
“The economics of this industry have developed to create a situation in which those who have more subsidise those who have less.
“While the idealism of a profession is certainly a very worthy goal, we must consider the impacts to the availability, cost and quality of advice.”
Mr Evans says the reforms will drive advisers back into becoming tied agents, which was the case more than 20 years ago when a life insurance adviser worked for the one life company selling only its products.
“The last thing we would want is to go back to a quasi-tied agency structure,” he said. “However, it appear
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Insurance company share prices have fallen sharply this week as estimates of the cost of Japan’s earthquake and ensuing nuclear emergency have risen. Shares in the global “full-line” insurance sector were down nearly 6 per cent in the five days following the earthquake, while the global reinsurance sector fell more than 4 per cent.
Although much of the cost will be carried by the Japanese government and local Japanese insurers, reinsurers including Swiss Re and Munich Re, and even UK insurers – such as Aviva and Prudential – have seen their shares hit as concerned investors sold out of their holdings.
Shares in insurers in the Lloyd’s market, including Catlin, Hiscox and Novae, also fell this week.
Analysts disagree over whether the scale of loss will have a major impact on the global insurance and reinsurance markets and cause the cost of all policies to rise.
“It
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Do we need some kind of permission to be creative? To live and do business outside the box? I mean, it’s not that small business creativity has to be so wild and far out—it just has to . I meet a lot of small business owners who deal with creativity as an afterthought. Well, just because our companies are small doesn’t mean our ideas and our solutions have to be tiny, too. Of course, creativity and innovation don’t have to be over the top, either.
Fast Company just came out with their 2011 100 Most Creative People in Business. It’s a diverse list with dynamic stories that inspire me (and hopefully you, too). Whether you are designing a physical product, redefining a company, writing stories and jokes, or figuring out a new way to communicate your political or corporate message, it’s the creativity that makes a company, a brand, an idea stand out.
And creativity works for small businesses too. In the beginn
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The European Banking Authority (EBA) continues to court controversy with the way it is administering the recent round of bank “stress” tests. The testing process has been in progress since March and is designed to restore confidence in the European banking system awash in questionable sovereign debt.
As part of the evaluation, the banks have been provided with a formula that will “address inconsistencies and excessive optimism” when it comes to assessing risk of these sovereign exposures. Based on the risk assumption, the banks can then determine the extent of the “haircut” to which they could face and then determine how much they need in reserves to cover the potential losses.
What the EBA is not doing, however, is to force the banks to simulate the impact of an actual default or debt restructuring. If the EBA is hoping to restore confidence with this approach, it leave much to be desired. Especially
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