Ballantyne: Advisers don't own clients

She said increasing regulatory scrutiny on the industry would bring changes to the way that advisers and insurers ran their businesses.

As part of the conduct and culture review, conducted by the Financial Markets Authority and Reserve Bank, she said, the insurer was challenged to prove it was doing right by clients.

“Prove that you haven't done bad things to your customers with no real guidance in terms of what that proof needed to look like or what would satisfy them. So, the biggest challenge of this conduct and culture work was really us asking ourselves, ‘how can we ... What are we looking for? How do we find it? And then how do we present it if we find it?’”

That had prompted Partners Life to think about how clients worked with advisers and the company, she said.