Insuiance
REFLECTIONS ON NEW BUSINESS.
WITH laudable-.promptness, a - number of Life Offices have already published the amount of the new business which they transacted last year. During the next few months we shall have corresponding information from all the companies, together with revenue accounts and balance sheets. There will also be, as indeed there has already been, some information about the bonuses to be paid this year.
Statistics of this kind suggest reflections which are not in all cases so satisfactory as they might be The first is the comparatively trifling amount of life assurance that the English and Scottish offices as a whole issue year by year. On a fair basis of comparison, with Canada and the United States, the people in this country have a totally inadequate amount of life assurance. One of the excuses sometimes made, which cannot honestly be called one of the reasons given, for abstaining from life assurance, is that people can do better with their money in other ways. The chances of this are probably 'greater in Canada and the States than they are here, and yet in proportion to population and general financial conditions, there is a vast deal more life assurance there than in this country.
There are at least two reasons for this state of affairs. One-is that on the other side of the Atlantic, life assurance is regarded as a serious and important matter. The men • who seek -to obtain proposals devote their whole time to the work, for which they are carefully trained and educated.- Here it is ,possible for a manager, when asked for a list of his agents, to send .for the Post Office Directory of London, and present that as his list. It cannot be expected that the casual. agent can give any adequate ieason for a nian taking .a policy, nor can such an agent be of any.issistance in choosing the most' suitable kind of assurance. True, these hangers-on mostly merely send names and addresses to the companies, and if the paid officials obtain the business, a commission is paid for the introduction. The two procedures are no bad indication of the esteem in which life assurance is held by the directors and 'managers Of insurance compitnieS on -the two sides 'of the Atlantic.
A second reason for the_ paucity of results in this Country is that the offices here do not, and the companies in Canada and America do, tell the story of life assurance through advertisement, and in other ways.. Attempts Were made -recently to establish some co-operative system of advertising assurance in. this country, but nothing practical resulted, and the consideration was postponed more or less - indefinitely.
From the point of view of their existing policy holders, a comparatively small amount of new business is likely to be advantageous. New policy holders are expensive to obtain, and the improvement in mortality through an influx of recently examined lives may not compensate for the heavy expenditure which a large new business involves. Life offices, however, have a great public service to render, and they may well have regard to this, rather than to an economy of expenditure which may possibly produce some small increase in the bonuses to participating policy holders.
Another thought that comes when looking at these new business figures is that a great many of the people who have taken policies have not chosen them in such a way as to get the greatest advantage from life assurance that they might. Nothing can well be more certain than that a great many people take endowment assurances for comparatively short periods when they ought to take them for long periods or select whole-life or limited- payment life -policies._ Happily, perhaps, ignorance is bliss, and many of these people will never know how foolish they have been. If only the companies would train and educate their representatives, and at the same time educate the public, the advantages rendered by life assurance would be even greater than. they. are.
WILLIAM SCHOOLING.
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