![\"\"](\"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/files\/2013\/03\/Bill-Shorten.jpg\")
<\/a>Responding to a series of questions from riskinfo in relation to churning, including whether he would look to introduce legislation to prevent life insurance churn, the Minister\u2019s office issued a single-line statement:<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Minister\u2019s expectation is that the industry will follow-through on their commitment to develop a workable solution.\u201d<\/p>\n
To date, the industry has been unable to reach consensus on how to best address churning. Last month the Financial Services Council (FSC) announced it would not pursue its controversial insurance framework (see: FSC Abandons Churn Policy<\/a>), amid criticism that life companies do not have sufficient data to determine how widespread the problem is.<\/p>\n Both the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA) and the Financial Planning Association have confirmed they are also working on the issue of insurance churn, together with broader industry topics including underinsurance, but at this stage neither association has issued a formal proposal for wider discussion.<\/p>\n While Minister Shorten\u2019s statement would indicate he is happy for the industry to continue down the self-regulation path, recent comments by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) suggest the regulator does have evidence of churning and that it intends to act against the perpetrators (see: ASIC Churning Decision \u2018Baffling\u2019<\/a>).<\/p>\n It is not the first time that ASIC has indicated it would focus its attention on the insurance industry. Speaking at the AFA\u2019s National Conference in October last year, ASIC Commissioner, Peter Kell<\/strong>, said: \u201cIn the course of recent ASIC investigations and surveillance work we have seen some inappropriate switching out of life insurance policies, resulting in detriment to consumers\u201d (see: ASIC Watching For Advisers Who Churn<\/a>).<\/p>\n More recently, an ASIC spokesperson told riskinfo the regulator was “\u2026 considering issues raised by recent developments with industry initiatives around churn and the implications for dealing with it”.<\/p>\n Mr Shorten\u00a0issued no comment in relation to whether he supported ASIC in its pursuit of inappropriate insurance switching.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Minister Bill Shorten said he expects the insurance industry to deliver a solution to the issue of churning, indicating that he will not take direct action, at least in the short term,\u00a0to address the controversial practice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":20000,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,270],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-19882","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-compliance-regulation","8":"category-remuneration"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19882\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}In the course of recent ASIC investigations and surveillance work we have seen some inappropriate switching out of life insurance policies<\/h6>\n