Our reporter Su Xianggao

  On the eve of "3.15", the Yunnan Supervision Bureau of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission issued the "Reminder on Preventing Risks such as Illegal "Agent Protection of Rights", warning consumers to prevent illegal "agent surrender" and "agent protection of rights" and other related risks.

  In fact, this is not the first time this year that regulation has suggested such risks.

At the beginning of the year, local bureaus of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission released the contents of the 2022 work conference. "Crack down on black products with surrender of insurance" and "rectify the disorder of agent surrender" were widely mentioned.

At the same time, many insurance companies have also warned against the risk of surrender of black products.

  In the past two years, the chain of "black product surrender" has gradually taken shape, that is, some surrender intermediaries instigate and instigate consumers to surrender their insurance in order to earn high handling fees paid by policyholders.

At the same time, it also attempted to defraud the insurance company for commissions, forming a "two-sided take-all" situation.

To this end, the "Securities Daily" infiltrated the inside of the surrender intermediary and exposed the truth of the black product surrender.

  Surrender agent claims to guarantee surrender

  exorbitant fees

  On March 12, a reporter from "Securities Daily" turned into an insured and joined a "full surrender" group of nearly 1,000 people.

On the same day, 7 people took the initiative to contact the reporter, asking if there was a need for surrender, and introduced relevant business.

  A staff member of a self-proclaimed "Renhua Studio" agency surrender agency told reporters that the company currently has two "guaranteed surrender" agency services: one is the "learning" method, that is, teaching surrender methods, allowing policyholders to surrender. Learn how to negotiate with insurance companies and regulatory agencies to achieve the purpose of surrendering the insurance. This method requires payment of 4,500 yuan in advance for tuition; the other is the "guidance" method, that is, the insured cooperates with the surrender person to transfer the original insurance contract and ID card. Copies and other materials are mailed to the agent and handed over to the docking person for surrender. The fee for this method is calculated at 30% of the premium paid.

  When asked if the fee standards and studio-related information could be reduced, the above-mentioned staff said, "This is already the lowest price in the industry", and "the studio is in Xiangyang", but did not provide the specific office address and relevant qualifications.

  Subsequently, according to a "surrender service agreement" (hereinafter referred to as the "agreement") sent by the staff member, the surrender is divided into two processes: the first part is "evidence analysis and evidence collection"; the second part is "Organization, writing and consulting of legal materials".

  It is interesting to note that many of the clauses in the "Agreement" require the policyholder to cut off contact with the insurance company.

For example, “After the policyholder entrusts the surrender authority of the designated policy agent to the surrender intermediary, he cannot apply to the insurance company for surrender of other policies during the period.” benefits, such as interest compensation and compensation under various names”, etc.

  In order to prove the authenticity of the "guaranteed surrender", the staff member sent a number of "customers" chat screenshots and videos to the reporter, and even the "customer"'s name, avatar, policy and other private information are clearly visible: "customer" Peng For a policy with a premium of 10,646 yuan, the woman was charged a handling fee of 4,258 yuan after the policy was successfully surrendered, and the service fee was as high as 40%.

  In addition, the reporter found out after inquiring to other agency surrender agencies that the charges for surrender services vary widely.

This is related to the size of the accumulated premiums paid by the policyholders. The larger the accumulated premiums, the cheaper the handling fee, and vice versa.

Wu Wenbing, the head of the lawyer team of Taihao Insurance, said that surrender intermediaries often get service fees of 30% to 60% of the accumulated premiums paid by the policyholders. The handling fee rate is high and the profit margin is huge.

  In this regard, a staff member of a QQ surrender agency nicknamed "unscrupulous" told reporters that the reason for the higher handling fee is that "now surrendering is not as easy as it used to be, and the part involving supervision is too troublesome".

The key to the success of surrendering insurance is whether it can collect enough evidence of non-compliance when insurance salesmen sell insurance policies, and then complain to regulators and put pressure on insurance companies.

  In the past two years, some surrender intermediaries have begun to instigate and instigate consumers to surrender their insurance. On the one hand, they can earn high handling fees paid by policyholders; situation.

This kind of behavior is called "black product surrender" in the industry, which seriously endangers the health and sustainable development of the industry.

  For example, the "Notice on Preventing Illegal "Agency Surrender" Risks and Effectively Maintaining Financial Order" recently issued by the Tongliao Supervision Branch of the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission shows that some surrender intermediaries, on the one hand, publish "full surrender" information through the Internet and other channels to encourage Consumers repeatedly complain to insurance companies, induce consumers to provide sensitive personal information, instigate consumers to ignore contractual agreements, fabricate facts, and repeatedly complain to regulators to achieve the illegal purpose of charging high agency fees; on the other hand, surrender intermediaries Induce consumers to "retire the old and invest in the new" and buy so-called "high-yield" wealth management products or insurance products from other companies to earn commissions from wealth management companies or insurance companies.

Some organizations also use the materials and information they hold, such as copies of consumers' bank cards and ID cards, to intercept and occupy consumers' surrender funds.

  Kou Wentong, head of Hony Insurance Consulting Services Co., Ltd., also told reporters that many insurance surrender intermediaries are now profit-oriented, and there are chaos such as creation out of nothing, malicious complaints, phishing recordings, etc., and even blatantly claim that any region in the country, any country, or any other country is openly declared on the self-media and the Internet. All types of insurance are 100% fully refundable.

  The relevant report released by the Insurance Association of China also shows that since the Yiwu People's Court pronounced a verdict on an agency surrender case in 2019, such cases have not been uncommon, and the black industry chain of "agent surrender" is deteriorating the entire ecological environment of the insurance industry.

  Agent surrenders frequently occur in chaos

  Insurance companies are to blame

  In the eyes of industry insiders, insurance companies are to blame for frequent surrenders.

Although there are many influencing factors such as surrender intermediaries blindly pursuing profits, lack of relevant knowledge of policyholders, and supervision to be improved, insurance companies have problems in business philosophy, marketing models, consumer protection, etc., or frequent surrenders. main reason.

  In this regard, Kou Wentong said that when insurance companies sell products, misleading sales such as false propaganda, exaggeration of insurance liabilities and product returns frequently occur, which provides a living soil for surrender intermediaries; at the same time, insurance companies do not manage salesmen. Strictly set the entry threshold for insurance agents too low, which leads to the phenomenon of aggressive recruitment in pursuit of short-term benefits, which in turn leads to large inflows and outflows of personnel, burying hidden dangers of surrender.

  Zhao Ying, member of the party group and director of the Political Department of Beijing Xicheng Court, said on March 11, "Life insurance contracts are often lengthy and contain a lot of professional concepts and medical terms, which are difficult for ordinary policyholders to understand accurately. In addition, individual insurance salespersons conduct business. Lack of integrity leads consumers to blindly apply for insurance, which can easily lead to subsequent failure to pay normal compensation and cause disputes.”

  Yan Zhikang, deputy general manager of Taiping Life Insurance, further analyzed that the underlying reasons for the spread of "agent surrender" are inherently related to the backlog of problems in the extensive stage of the life insurance industry and the overall situation of industry transformation.

Specifically, first, to a certain extent, life insurance companies have long tended to focus on incremental business development and light on existing business management. There are weak links in the company's internal control, especially customer information management and agent management and control, which has led to the risk of surrender intermediaries. Empty can be drilled; second, in the stage of extensive development of the life insurance industry, the company focuses on sales and neglects services, focusing on adding staff and educating people, resulting in a low overall agent ability and uneven quality. Especially in the past two years, business pressure has increased sharply, In the case of declining income, it is more likely to be affected by the surrender of black products; third, customers' understanding and recognition of products and services needs to be improved, the industry's public opinion image has been poor for a long time, and customers lack sufficient trust in the industry, so they are intermediaries for surrender. It is possible to induce customers to provide the possibility; fourth, the insurance consumer rights protection system has not yet been perfected, which leads to the use of complaint handling rules by surrender intermediaries to put pressure on insurance companies to achieve the purpose of surrender.

  Guo Zhenhua, director of the Insurance Department of Shanghai University of International Business and Economics, said that my country's life insurance industry has entered a trough, which not only means a decline in the value of new business and a decline in future profit levels, but also means that the industry cannot generate commissions of the same scale as before through regular payment of new orders. And business management fees, the substantial reduction of commissions will inevitably lead to a sharp decline in the income of the agents and the loss of personnel, which may also lead to the loss of personnel to join the surrender agency to illegally profit.

  In addition, at a seminar held by the China Insurance Industry Association last year, a number of insurance company executives also said that many of the life insurance companies in the past did not increase their sales force, but increased their customers. Warrants and zombie teams.

At the same time, the sales force is subject to various assessments and interests, and the service is often a means of promotion and customer acquisition. The problem of misleading sales will not be cured for a long time, and the sales staff have a low level of professionalism and lack of professional training, all of which provide a living soil for the chaos of surrender.

  Strong demand from policyholders

  Frequent chaos is not conducive to the development of the industry

  The reporter found that in a QQ group called "Full Surrender Exchange Group", many policyholders "posted their insurance policies" and sought a way to fully surrender their insurance.

In addition, if you enter keywords such as "surrender" and "surrender by proxy" in the search bar, dozens of related QQ groups will appear, and policyholders in individual groups communicate quite frequently.

It can be seen that there is a large room for surrender demand in the market.

  From an industry perspective, consumers’ surrender payments are relatively large.

Data shows that in the first three quarters of 2021, the total original premium income of the life insurance business of the five major A-share listed insurance companies was 1,314.2 billion yuan, and the total surrender amount reached 120.5 billion yuan, accounting for 9% of the current original premium income.

In addition, according to an industry exchange data, in 2020, the scale of surrender of life insurance companies will reach 320.72 billion yuan.

From the perspective of insurance types, the surrender of participating life insurance accounts for 40.3% of the surrender of life insurance companies, and the surrender of ordinary life insurance accounts for 55.1% of the surrender of life insurance companies, becoming two "high-frequency" surrender types.

  The conventional surrender channel often means that the policyholder has to lose part of the premium, causing dissatisfaction among the policyholder.

More importantly, although surrender losses are stated in the insurance contract, many policyholders do not read the relevant clauses carefully, and some marketers do not inform the relevant losses before applying for insurance.

In this context, when the insured does not want to continue to pay the premiums, and on the other hand, it is difficult to accept the surrender losses, they will "swords to take a slant" in order to meet the demand for full surrender by means of a surrender intermediary.

  Senior actuary Xu Yuchen introduced as an example, "An insured person has insured a critical illness insurance with a premium of 10,000 yuan in the first year. If he surrenders the insurance in accordance with the insurance contract in the second year, the surrender amount may be only a few hundred yuan. But if the insurance surrenders If the intermediary can successfully surrender the insurance in full, it is cost-effective even if it pays a handling fee of 60% of the premium.”

  The frequent occurrence of insurance surrenders has brought many negative impacts to the industry.

For consumers, blind surrender may lead to loss of insurance protection, personal information may also be maliciously leaked or traded, and property losses may be caused if surrender fees cannot be recovered; Malicious complaints not only encroach on consumers' legitimate rights protection channels and resources, but also hinder effective communication between consumers and insurance companies and regulatory authorities.

  Three parties work together

  Fight against surrender chaos

  Curbing the chaos of surrenders requires the joint efforts of insurance companies, regulators, and policyholders.

  At the insurance company level, managing the chaos of surrender needs to start from the development model of insurance companies.

Yan Zhikang believes that it is necessary to be problem-oriented, "inside and outside", and achieve the purpose of addressing both the symptoms and root causes by improving the management and internal control level of insurance companies.

At the same time, Wu Wenbing also said that insurance companies should pay attention to the marketing model, pay attention to compliance operations, and avoid the risk of surrender.

  At the regulatory level, Yan Zhikang suggested multi-dimensional strengthening of joint crackdown efforts: first, to speed up the establishment of an industry information sharing mechanism; second, to establish industry internal control guidelines, absorb the experience of various companies in combating and prevention work, and formulate operational internal control guidelines; Under the guidance and coordination of the unit, cooperate with relevant units such as public security, market supervision, and Internet information to carry out special governance actions against illegal industries; fourth, promote the judicial organs to clarify the legal identification and application standards for illegal activities, so as to strengthen the investigation of suspected crimes. Criminal crackdown on black production.

At the same time, Xu Yuchen suggested that regulatory agencies should optimize the complaint mechanism to avoid regulatory loopholes being exploited by criminals.

  In addition, consumers must also "self-evolve" and be alert to the risk of illegal "agent surrender".

  Xu Yuchen said that policyholders should strengthen their studies to avoid being "wool" by surrender intermediaries.

In response to reasonable surrender needs, consumers can actively protect their rights through legal channels.

In addition, consumers should be wary of the so-called "retire old and invest in new" propaganda. If they rush to surrender their insurance and want to re-insure in the future, they may face risks such as recalculation of the waiting period, increased premiums, and rejection of insurance.

  In response to the reasonable demand for surrender, Kou Wentong suggested that, on the premise of retaining evidence, policyholders can protect their rights through multiple channels: first, to report truthfully to the insurance company; second, to make a complaint to the complaint hotline disclosed by the regulatory agency; third, to contact professional mediation Organizing application for mediation; fourth, resolving through arbitration, litigation and other channels.

(Securities Daily)