The Financial Services Council (FSC) has supported recommendations that prevent insurers from pressuring consumers to buy products over the phone.
FSC chief executive, Sally Loane, said the practice was ‘not acceptable’ and that insurers should be unable to make cold outbound calls for the purposes of selling life or consumer credit insurance.
The recommendation comes from the Financial Services Royal Commission’s recommendation 4.1 that hawking of insurance products should be prohibited. The FSC supported another claim in the recommendation 4.1 earlier this week over Unfair Contract Terms.
Loane said: “There is no place for cold calling and pressuring random people into buying a life insurance product they don’t need, want or understand.
“For an outbound call to be justified, a person must first have given their positive, clear and informed consent, before being contacted.
“Additionally, given there is no legislated time frame in which calls need to be made, the FSC believes an initial call should be made within three months of consent.”
She acknowledged the insurance industry had already made progress through better use of monitoring, remuneration practices, appropriate incentives and the FSC Life Insurance Code of Practice.
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What a joke the FSC are. Their members (up until the Royal Commission) were the biggest perpetrators of cold calling to flog direct junk insurance. It was their plan to ramp it up post LIF (perpetrated by the FSC through corrupt means).
Now they want to appear to be the good guys.
They have board members who were the biggest sellers of direct junk through cold calling and if twitter is to be believed some are partial to some heavy partying and some who make fools of themselves at the RC.
The FSC are and remain a lobby group for profit and do not represent the honest people in this industry.
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