Year 2017 - HOW TO PROMOTE THE POSITIVE IMAGE OF INSURANCE MARKET 如何提升保險業的專業形象

專題探討 Feature With a robust statutory regulatory regime for the Hong Kong insurance industry which has been put in place for more than 2 decades and which has been evolving with increasingly stringent requirements over these years, and with an immediate goal of having the newly established Independent Insurance Authority becoming the sole insurance regulator by recovering regulatory powers from the three Self-Regulatory Organisations, would whoever working in the insurance industry hesitate to call themselves ‘professionals’? Before planning to improve the image of the insurance industry, the industry had better find out how it is perceived by the insuring public. Without easy access to the findings of any similar research done in Hong Kong, please allow me to share with you the results of a Gallup poll done in December 2016 to find out Americans’ rating of the honesty and ethics of people in 22 different fields. Compared with Nurses who were ranked number 1 and who were rated ‘Very High or High’ by 84% of the respondents, Insurance Salespeople were ranked number 20 with a rating of 11% for ‘Very High or High’. In fact, Americans have been giving a rather low honesty/ ethics rating to Insurance Salespeople for quite a number of years. In the eyes of the insurance practitioners or the consumers, what are the criteria to be regarded as professionals? I believe that most, if not all, of the insurance practitioners would say: mandatory pre-work education or examination and mandatory continuing education. However, I think the list of the criteria for a profession should be much longer than this and at least include the public’s recognition of the insurance occupation as a profession and the insurance industry’s long term commitment to high ethical standards. The importance of the insuring public’s perception of the insurance industry cannot be understated because no one would want to deal with an insurance practitioner whose integrity is questionable. The consumer must have a very high degree of trust in a particular insurance intermediary before he or she would buy insurance from the latter, because to the average consumer every insurance product is so complex that he or she has no practical alternative but to heavily rely on the insurance intermediary to provide a suitable, if not the best, insurance solution. Apart from legal obligations, it is very much the ethics of the insurance intermediary that the consumer would expect so as to establish his or her trust in the insurance intermediary. But how could the overall level of ethics in the insurance industry be raised? ‘By ethics training’, I would say. As we all know, Insurance companies must be spending lots of money in sales training over the years. Now, they ought to realise that ethics training is an equally important tool that they can use to attain meaningful business growth in the long run. At present, the continuing professional development requirements, as an important element of the Insurance Intermediaries Quality Assurance Scheme, do not include mandatory ethics training for insurance intermediaries. It is interesting to see whether the Independent Insurance Authority will sooner or later look into the desirability of making ethics training mandatory for insurance intermediaries and even for employees of insurance companies. All we want is to “ promote the positive image of the insurance market ”. 黃倩瑛博士 高峰進修學院院長 職業訓練局 Dr Lillian Wong Principal, Institute of Professional Education and Knowledge Vocational Training Council 28 2016 年刊與 2017 展望 YEARBOOK 2016 & PROSPECT 2017