No improvement in life/risk says ASIC
Life/risk advisers can expect further close scrutiny by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) in circumstances where the regulator claims to have witnessed little improvement in the delivery of non-compliant life insurance advice.
ASIC has used answers to questions on notice from the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Corporations and Financial Services to claim there had been little improvement within the improvement beyond what it reported in its 2014 Review of Retail Life Insurance Advice (Report 413).
“The problems with life insurance advice are not confined to one segment of the industry. Report 413 looked at advice from both unaligned financial advisers and the vertically integrated channel of advisers. The report uncovered significant problems across both groups of advisers,” it said.
“The problems were more acute in the independently owned financial advice licensees. In this segment of the market, over half the advice failed to comply with the law,” the parliamentary answer said.
“ASIC's recent general surveillance and enforcement work reflects similar rates of non-compliant life insurance advice to that set out in REP 413, that is, we have not seen changes in this trend,” the regulator told the committee.
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