Life insurance agents and brokers hope their clients will never need the term insurance policies they purchased.  I dont know of many sales jobs in which the sales person prefers their clients dont use the product they sold them.

Yesterday, once again I was reminded why I choose to sell life insurance.  We received a call from one of our clients beneficiaries that our client passed away.  She was inquiring about how to file a claim.  It is never an easy conversation for me, but knowing that the life insurance policy my client purchased from me is going to provide for his family for many years, helps me get through the call.

In this profession, its not difficult to get into the daily minutiae involved in selling life insurance policies from completing a mind-numbing amount of paperwork to working with sometimes-stubborn underwriters, etc.  On some days, one can get so wrapped up in these details that one can lose sight of why we do it.

Speaking to my clients recently-deceased wife and helping her navigate through the claims process, I remembered (again) why I sell life insurance.  Sure, I earn a good living and I get to speak with a lot of interesting people from all over the country.  However, it is knowing that I am helping my clients to financially protect their families futures that makes this a great a great occupation. 

Aon Corporation’s risk management business Aon Risk Solutions and ACE have implemented Ruschlikon accounting and settlement standards via The Exchange.

The implementation will augment London market’s e-capabilities and will allow for the notification and settlement of insurance premiums and claims on business outside the bureaux.

The Ruschlikon initiative is a working group of global insurance and reinsurance industry organisations who work together to define and implement international business rules for processing insurance and reinsurance transactions using ACORD standards.

Using Ruschlikon eAccounting solution, the entire UK and international market, brokers and carriers will be able to automate premium and claim processes administered outside of the London bureaux, with quicker settlement times and greater security.

Aon Risk Solutions CIO Ian Summers said with the addition of accounting and settlement messaging using the Ruschlikon rules, The Exchange now supports the life cycle of the insurance transaction process; e-placement through e-endorsements, premiums and claims.

“ACE see a significant opportunity to extend these settlement and accounting benefits to the wider market already connected to The Message Exchange platform and to continue our drive to improve operational performance,” Summers said.

Home maintenance insurance company HomeServe has suspended all telephone sales and marketing activity, and is retraining telesales staff amid fears that policies have been mis-sold to customers.

The firm, which offers cover against boiler breakdowns and problems with plumbing and drainage alongside one-off repairs, has 3 million customers in the UK who hold 7.5m policies.

It has started a retraining programme and has developed a script for staff to use. It said it would begin to take inbound calls from consumers on 1 November, but would not restart making calls until its staff had been retrained and it was confident that all sales procedures met the standard it expected.

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It follows a working group with the British Insurance Brokers Association (Biba), the Institute of Insurance Brokers (IIB) and several comparison websites.

The ABI said the guidance is a prompt for firms to enhance their ability to detect and disrupt fraud at application and should help to avoid accepting customers who are applying fraudulently.

It expects this to complement the established industry capability in detecting fraud when claims are made and added it was another piece of the jigsaw in the fight against fraud.

The ABI also said that the guidance will help insurers, brokers and comparison sites to better identify some of the danger signs of possible fraud at the proposal form stage, such as:

• differing risk and correspondence addresses,• fake and tampered with documents.

The guidance will be available from 27 October and circulated widely via all the trade association and comparison websites.