A long-established life insurance survey has been relaunched this year under a new name and with revised survey and reporting measures.  

Beaton Research and Consulting acquired the WA Taylor Multi-client Intermediary Study in 2009 and used the same methodology in that year’s report.

The process was reviewed for last year’s benchmarking survey after consultation with the life insurance industry.

Beaton Director of Research Rebecca Sheils says the company started a lengthy consultation process, talking to subscribers, major insurers and professional bodies.

Dr Sheils says the biggest change made to the report is the adviser sampling process.

“In the past, the insurance providers had control of the sampling,” she told insuranceNEWS.com.au. “The comments raised some concern about the sampling process, so we took control.”

Beaton asked insurers to provide their complete adviser database of independent financial advisers.

“We ended up with eight databases and then set about removing duplicated entries,” Dr Sheils said.

“We now believe it contains nearly every independent adviser in Australia.”

Another change was to introduce greater rigour into the benchmarking process by ensuring the sample of advisers rating each provider was the same.

“This was done by segmenting the market into four equal categories based on contribution to production across the industry in the previous financial year, and then weighting the survey data so that each adviser category contributed 25% of the survey results,” Dr Sheils said.

“We wanted to make sure the data was weighted to reflect the amount of business the adviser did across the industry.”