A day doesn’t go by it seems to me that we don’t make assumptions. Be it in our personal lives or business endeavours we all seem to assume certain things without much thought or investigation. Sometimes our assumptions are right, however, more often than not they are wrong. I suppose that why we sometimes hear that old saying … when you assume you make an ass of you and me.

The Financial Services sector is no different – it is full of people who make assumptions. A friend of Fintechnix, Tony Cook, a Partner in the Actuarial Practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers, launched a research report we published late last year. In his talk he commented that the Life Insurance industry like many others is wonderful at talking amongst themselves but very poor at talking to their clients – actual or prospective.

This got me thinking. Tony was right. Of the hundreds of conferences, seminars and presentations I have attended over the years I can’t remember even one that highlighted what a Life Insurance client or prospect really wanted. We all assumed that we knew what they wanted.

To help close this gap, a few weeks ago we conducted an online survey asking real peopleabout Life Insurance. When I say real people I mean people not in the Life Insurance industry. People like teachers, electricians, government workers, midwives, sales people, builders and motor mechanics just to name a few. Amongst other things we asked them:

• Is life insurance important?
• Do you use a financial planner?
• What event would cause you to buy life insurance?
• Have you bought life insurance because of a radio or tv commercial?

We had 122 people respond to the survey. I don’t have the space here to share all the findings of the survey so here are some of the key results we found most interesting:

• About 70% of the survey believed they had enough life insurance. Funny given that only 35% rated their knowledge of life insurance as “very good.”
• Unsurprisingly 83% of people said that increased financial liability (e.g. mortgage) would cause them to consider buying more life insurance. However, what was surprising was that only 5% would think about more like insurance if they lost their job.
• Flying in the face of the huge success of the direct insurance offerings in recent years, only 2% of those surveyed said that they bought life insurance due to a radio or tv commercial.

We will be releasing the report on the survey shortly. So watch this space!