Opinion: Life by numbers
Do you know how much life insurance business was sold last year? What about the amount paid in claims? How about how many people died? Then what they died of…
Wednesday, February 18th 2009, 5:25AM
by Russell Hutchinson
I would hope anyone wanting to convince another person of the importance of having life insurance, disability cover, trauma cover, or medical insurance would have some familiarity with what the cover actually does and whether it pays out.
It may be true that the hardest job in the world is to find new insurance clients, which is why it pays so well, but it appears that it’s nearly as hard to get insurance brokers to read policy documents.
To be fair, starting to read them is easy, staying awake long enough to finish is the trick. After that, I might expect you to be able to tell me how much is sold and how much is paid in claims.
These numbers answer the most common, unstated questions most clients have – does anyone else buy this stuff? And, will they pay out?
But most insurance brokers would probably have a better idea what the current OCR is – valuable, useful information, but as a matter of professional pride, you should know the data for your sector first.
So here are those numbers you were after – according to the ISI: about $189 million new annual premium was sold for the year to the end of September 2008 – about 10% up on the year before, all very good – especially when every other financial services sector was going backwards. But best of all, the claims paid were $744 million (including groups and medical). No receiver’s payment schedule involved at all – so again, a number well worth knowing.
How many people died? Why not start your own personal research and check out www.stats.govt.nz.
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