Yesterday we held the ASSET Magazine Insurance roundtable. This is where we get together a group of people from various parts of the life industry to discuss current issues.

I wasn’t going to discuss this until a little closer to when we publish the Round Table discussion in ASSET.

However an item on TV3’s Campbell Live last night picked up on one of the issues discussed.

The issue is simple – the public perception of life insurance and risk advisers.

On Campbell Live there was a piece getting stuck into Sovereign for not paying a claim made by a guy who was dying of prostate cancer.

It seems the key issue is the man had failed to disclose a number of important conditions when he filled out the application form.

What was fascinating is that although Sovereign’s clinical director John Mayhew tried to put the case, it was impossible to make any headway as Campbell clearly didn’t understand how life insurance works. Rather he played on a strong emotional line: How can you deny paying a claim to a man who  is dying?

This isn’t the only example of bad press for life insurance. The whole financial sector took a hiding in the Sunday Star Times this week when it published results of a survey. The key point, and it is little surprise in this market, is that there was little trust of the either advisers or the firms who provide investment and insurance products.

Perhaps most galling was a comment no one trusted insurance advisers anyway so it was no surprise there wasn’t a positive public perception.

When things go wrong it makes headlines. It’s really easy for the media to be critical of life insurance.

Also when things go wrong there are plenty of willing outlets for the story where it is current affairs shows like Campbell Live or Fair Go.

The point is that the media totally ignore the great work life insurance plays and the thousands of claims they pay out each year worth many millions of dollars.

What the life insurance industry needs to do is get out and sell its good news story. It has a great story to tell. It has thousands of people who have benefited from having life insurance.

It’s time the industry put aside its differences and works together to get the facts out there.

The sooner it happens the better it will be for everybody (except the uninitiated who want to tell sensationist stories).

The eagerly awaited announcement of who is on the “Code Committee” has landed. The announcement of the 10 names this week is bound to generate some debate and I suspect quite a few grumblings.

The future of the financial advisory industry rests in their hands to some degree. They are the 10 who will write the rules around regulation.

I know most of the people and have nothing personally against any of them, but I do have to scratch my head over the make up of the committee.

The main point, as has been made in some comments to this story, is that there appears to be no one with any experience on the life insurance side of the industry. Likewise the mortgage broking community seems to have been ignored too.

A second point which has been raised is that the committee has a strong feeling of lawyers and managers rather than practitioners.

Is this committee really representative of the advisory industry?

I’ve heard many of these people speak before and also discussed issues with some of them individually. Unfortunately in some cases there is a lack of understanding of the advisory world and even some hostility towards it.

I understand many, many people put their names forward, and some of those turned down were, in my view, excellent candidates.

There is no point pre-judging what the committee comes up with, but I, like many others, hope that they are workable and sensible rules which ensure we have a robust, professional advisory industry.

What do you think of the make-up? Let us know by commenting below.

I was having a good weekend until Sunday night when I read two politicians publicly getting into the ING CDO debate and arguing the offer made to investors was unfair.

To get straight to the point, this posturing from Peter Dunne and Lianne Dalziel is absolute cheap, political garbage.

I have publicly stated before, and I will say it again: Good on ING and ANZ for fronting up and putting up to $400 million of their own money into this problem. Show me another similar company who has been prepared to do something like this?

You can’t because there isn’t one.

The closest is Hanover.

If the politicians had any interest in investor protection they would have made and enforced rules to stop some of the shonky finance companies even getting off the ground. If they did their job some of the directors of these shonky companies would be in jail now – for a long time.

Jeez the US has already locked Madoff up for the rest of his life. His ponzi scheme came to light well after some of ours fell over.

Dalziel and Dunne have been lawmakers for a long time. One is, and has been, Revenue Minister for some time and the other Commerce Minister.

They could have made a difference. They didn’t.

Today’s announcement makes them look silly.

Around 95% of investors have accepted the ING offer. They knew what they were getting into as there has been ample publicity around the offer and the indemnity.

If it was such a bad deal they had the chance to say no. They haven’t. They had the choice.

As an aside there seems to be some great irony here. If the Frozen Funds group thought it was so bad then they shouldn’t have accepted it. Seems to me the bulk of them have (the only other conclusion is the group’s membership isn’t that big).

Let’s get this argument straight. While the indemnity bit of the offer leaves a lump in the throat, it’s not an unusual offer. If I was the one stumping up with the money I would do the same thing – wouldn’t you?

If you look at all the other carnage out there in the past few years this is the best and the most generous offer put on the table.

These blokes running finance companies still have their flash houses and cars and haven’t offered diddly squat to their debenture holders.

Let’s have a reality check, get politicians to do important things, and move on (and never-ever make a CDO fund again).