Australia’s 18,000 financial advisers are now deriving almost half of their income from selling life insurance, according to research house CoreData.

This has been the result of a shift from consumers wanting advice on life insurance rather than investments during the global financial crisis, the researchers found.

The preliminary findings of the CoreData 2010 Risk Study show 48.6% of financial advisers’ total risk income came from new clients.

And one in five advisers expect to increase the amount of life insurance written with their main risk provider by more than 20% during the next 12 months.

“Almost half of all advisers (48.1%) expect the level of risk being written to increase, while only 9.3% expect the amount of risk written to decrease,” CoreData said.

While life insurers continue to develop new electronic processes, almost half the advisers are still submitting paper-based proposals.

The research found 43.1% are using web-based applications and only 7.6% are using “smart forms” such as saveable PDFs from a desktop quoting tool.