Report
Insurers still reward advisers with more than commission. Nobody has counted it since 2017
Source: FMA, Ensuring fair consumer outcomes from insurer benefits and campaigns (MR No. 2026-27)
The last count found $34 million in two years, including $1.9 million to fly 20 advisers to London. Roughly half of those deals would be illegal today. The rest are still legal, still unpublished, and your adviser has to disclose them if one applied to your advice.
By Henry Smith · Regulation · 2026-06-11
What this means for you If you took out life or health cover through an adviser before 31 March 2025, the insurer may have been running a gift, prize draw or trip campaign at the time, and the regulator's 2026 report does not say which insurers or campaigns those were. Rewards that depend on the adviser hitting a sales target have been banned since that date, but conference invitations, paid training and trips handed out at the insurer's discretion are still allowed, and they still count as incentives an adviser has to disclose. Nothing in the report changes the cover you already hold or what it pays out.
The last time anyone counted, one New Zealand insurer had spent $1.9 million flying 20 financial advisers to London, about $95,000 an adviser. Another ran a competition that entered advisers into a draw for a new BMW, with more entries the more policy value they sold. The overseas destinations handed out as sales prizes in those years included Shanghai, Prague, Las Vegas, Hollywood, Rome, New York and Rio de Janeiro, and one adviser, a heavy switcher of clients from one insurer to another, took ten such trips in four years (FMA, Replacing life insurance, who benefits?, page 5, June 2016).
That was life and health insurers rewarding the advisers who sell their policies, in the two years to March 2017. Nine insurers spent $34 million on 242 separate gifts, prizes and campaigns over that period. Nobody has published a comparable figure since (FMA, Conflicted remuneration (soft commissions) in the life and health insurance industry, page 5, May 2018).
Since 31 March 2025, a reward an adviser earns by hitting a sales target has been banned. That covers roughly half of what the regulator documented back then. The other half was never tied to a target and is still allowed: the conference invitation, the paid training, the sponsorship, the trip handed out at the insurer's discretion. Those still count as incentives your adviser has to disclose. And the newest report on the practice from the Financial Markets Authority, or FMA, published in June 2026, contains no dollar figure at all.
For anyone who took out life or health cover through an adviser, that is the practical position. Nothing here changes the cover you hold or what it pays out. What it changes is what you can reasonably ask: whether a perk or a short-term campaign sat behind the recommendation you were given, and what it was worth. No published document will tell you, because there is none.
We read the public documents. We were not briefed and we spoke to nobody.
What the last count actually found
The FMA polices how financial firms treat their customers. In 2017 it used a legal notice to make nine insurers hand over their numbers: AIA, Asteron Life, AMP, Fidelity Life, nib nz, OnePath, Partners Life, Southern Cross and Sovereign, as the FMA listed them at the time. The data runs from April 2015 to March 2017.
| What the FMA counted | Two years to March 2017 |
|---|---|
| Separate gift, prize or campaign offers | 242 |
| Total spend | $34 million |
| That spend as a share of the insurers' income from new policies | 9% of $377 million |
| Spend on trips | $18 million across 29 trips |
| Advisers who received a trip | about 800 |
| Offers with a sales target attached | 42% |
| Largest single insurer's spend | $12 million |
| Smallest single insurer's spend | $209,000 |
All figures from the same 2018 review (FMA, executive summary and pages 9 to 13).
The trips ran from four days in Queenstown with heli-skiing, a wine tour and a motorsport driving experience, $103,000 for 12 advisers, up to the London trip above. Sponsorship, the quieter version of the same idea, accounted for $1.7 million across 72 offers in the same two years.
What was banned in 2025, and what was not
New rules took effect on 31 March 2025. A reward is banned if the adviser gets it, or gets more of it, by hitting a sales target. The rules give their own example of a banned reward: a $1,000 bonus for selling at least 100 life policies in three months. An insurer must not offer a banned reward to an adviser who sells its products (Financial Markets Conduct Regulations 2014, regulations 237E and 237G(2)(c)).
The same 2018 review found that 42% of the 242 offers required the adviser to sell a set number or value of the insurer's products. Apply that share to that count and roughly 102 of them would be prohibited today. That arithmetic, and that reading of the rule, are ours rather than the FMA's.
Every trip carried qualifying conditions, usually set to reward the insurer's biggest sellers, and many carried a persistency condition too: no more than 15% of the adviser's existing clients could cancel or switch away during the qualifying period (the same review, pages 9 to 13). That gave the adviser a paid stake in your policy staying exactly where it was.
What survives the ban is the untargeted half, and that is what the FMA now supervises: the invitation, the training, the sponsorship, and the trip given at the insurer's discretion to advisers it "wanted to build a stronger relationship" with.
Why the 2026 report has no numbers
In June 2025 the FMA wrote to insurance company chief executives, having noticed rewards designed to push business through outside advisers rather than an insurer's own staff. It published what it learned on 11 June 2026 (FMA, MR No. 2026-27). Michael Hewes, its Director of Deposit-taking Insurance and Advice, said the benefits and campaigns "have a place but insurers should actively consider these risks".
The findings are descriptions, not numbers. Most insurers have some process for spotting and managing the conflict of interest, but the approaches vary. Some involve only a narrow group of people when a campaign is designed. Some had not considered adviser incentives at all when reviewing how their products are sold. The regulator wants more people at the design stage, records of who approved what, monitoring of how incentives change behaviour, and reviews that look for harm rather than wait for complaints. No insurer is named. No campaign is named. No amount is given.
The reason is the method. The 2017 count exists because the FMA used a legal notice to compel nine insurers to hand over their spending. The 2026 work asked insurers how they govern these rewards rather than what they spend on them, so there was no comparable figure to publish.
How do I find out what applied to my policy?
You ask, and the rules say you have to be told.
The disclosure rules cover perks, not just cash. A commission or other incentive is defined as anything given because advice was given, or because the client acted on it, "whether monetary or non-monetary and whether direct or indirect" (the same regulations, Schedule 21A clause 2(3)). For each one, your adviser must tell you when it is given, who gives it and to whom, and what it is worth or how that is worked out.
So the question to put to an adviser is not "do you get paid commission". It is whether any perk or short-term campaign from the insurer applied to your policy, and what it was worth.
The insurer gets a different question, because the insurer holds the records. The conduct law for banks and insurers, known as CoFI, requires them to keep records good enough to show they treat customers fairly, including written procedures for approving these benefits and campaigns. Ask whether a campaign was running for advisers in the month your policy was issued.
Both the insurer and the adviser must belong to a free, independent complaints scheme. The FMA's own view is that relying on complaints is not sufficient monitoring, but a complaint is still the thing that puts a specific case on the record.
Some share of the cover sold through advisers before 31 March 2025 sat inside a campaign of some kind, and nothing on the public record says which policies those were. Asking is the only step that turns an eight-year-old national figure into an answer about your own file.
What could we not check?
There is no public register of insurer sales campaigns in New Zealand. We could not verify one running now, and we will not describe a campaign we cannot source.
The $34 million, and every figure under it, describes April 2015 to March 2017 and nine named insurers. The market, the rules and the company structures have all changed since. In January 2019 the FMA and the Reserve Bank reported that the last insurers offering overseas trips had said they would stop, either immediately or within the following year (FMA and RBNZ, Life Insurer Conduct and Culture, page 18). Nothing here says any of those campaigns still exist.
Our estimate of about 102 offers applies a percentage the FMA reported to a count the FMA reported, then reads today's ban against the qualifying conditions the FMA described. The FMA has not published that conclusion and may not agree with it. Whether one particular old reward would be caught depends on facts we do not have.
The 2026 report is guidance for insurers. It does not accuse anyone of breaking the law, and neither do we.
QuoteHub is operated by Craig Smith Business Services Limited, trading as Smiths Insurance and KiwiSaver, a licensed Financial Advice Provider (FSP712931), meaning the FMA licenses us to give financial advice. Our arrangements with insurers are set out on our disclosure page.
What this means for your cover
What a policy pays, how to size it, and how a rule change reaches an existing policy. Life insurance in New Zealand
Sources
Every source below was read and checked on 21 August 2026.
- FMA, Ensuring fair consumer outcomes from insurer benefits and campaigns, MR No. 2026-27
- FMA, Insurer benefits and campaigns insights
- FMA, Conflicted remuneration (soft commissions) in the life and health insurance industry
- FMA, Replacing life insurance, who benefits?
- FMA and RBNZ, Life Insurer Conduct and Culture
- Financial Markets Conduct Regulations 2014
Talk to a licensed adviser about what this means for you · free, no obligation.
Explore related pages: Life Insurance, Income Protection, Health Insurance, Trauma Insurance, Guides.