Monday, April 13, 2009

Don't let money managers off the hook

Hold them accountable, says Jack Bogle.

2 comments:

zhummmeng said...

This is taken from REACH and I would title it as "DON'T TRUST THE INSURANCE AGENTS" to complement an article by Lorna in the Sunday Times about agents.

I am a ex insurance agent .
The market is ruled by the law of the jungle. The insurance agent can pitch anything they like and the supervisor doesn't care so long you bring in the sale. In fact the supervisors don't want to know and so is the company. The quota is most important.
You cringe when you hear your colleagues pitch the products over the phone, probably no difference from scammers.
You are taught to sell products and how to sell them using all sorts of unethical means from partial disclosure to untruths and lies.
At first I thought the company I represented and thier agents were behaving like this until I left to join another one. It was even worse and finding from other friends in the business I concluded the whole industry is like that. I felt depressed that here an industry purported to help the consumers meet their financial needs it is actually fleecing them by using unethical methods to dump dubious and useless products on them.
If you think the consumers don't lose money you are wrong. It is far worse than minibond. As long you don't keep your policies for at least 20 years you lose money and there are millions of customers. it is cancerous , slowly pilfering your money. Worse , consumers don't know and when they find out it is usually after along time. Too late. It is not uncommon to hear cursing and swearing when these policyholders realise it.
It is supposed a noble profession but it is actually a legal robbing profession.I wonder there is any law enforcer.
No wonder a lot of people want to become an insurance agent. Long time ago it used to be the school dropouts or people who could not find a decent job, lowly educated who had no choice. But today everybody wants to join, university grads, male and female, engineers and CPAs. Don't blame them. Which job pays 5 figure income in the first year?Which job lets you earn so much money by talking and bullshitting? Exams to pass? They are walk through. They are tikam tikam exams even the most idiotic can pass.After a couple of months with some product knowledge you are ready and licensed to prowl the streets to con the consumers. The products we specialised are wholelife and endowment and regular ILPs. These products pay very lucrative and high commission. Just focus on them and you be rich and can qualify for mdrt and overseas incentive trips. These incentives are based on commission. It is dumb to sell term products, right? Ethical agents cannot make money.
And normally we will think of all the negative things about term products and discourage the customers. In other words we also specialised to talk bad about term products.
So you see, what kind of industry it is .Unless the regulator do something the consumers will continue to be the losers and they still don't know. That is why they are known as suckers. Suckers are many and the only way to identify suckers is to work on numbers.This method is also used by tissue sellers at hawker centres. Just talk to as many people . For every 10 people we see and talk to there bound to be 3 suckers who will fall for our trick.
I hope with this sharing i can wake up the consumers and the regulator to do something about the industry. The agents are not qualified to plan and advise consumers. The products today are scam. The companies cannot be trusted. Remember they are to make money for the shareholders.

Solomon said...

What can we do? The law seems to be on their sides. The FIs are the robber, enforcer, judge and jury all in one.

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