The Financial Services Authority hopes to boost consumer confidence in the way insurance products are sold when it takes over regulation of insurance brokers.
The FSA, which is expected to take over broker regulation from 2004, said some consumers lacked confidence in the industry and its intermediaries.
Delivering the Annual Association of Insurance and Risk Managers lecture, FSA chairman Sir Howard Davies said the regulator planned to look at the relationship between brokers and the companies that they represented.
Sir Howard said the FSA was concerned that brokers were using pressure sales to get consumers to buy redundant or duplicate insurance cover which they did not need.
He said greater transparency was also needed over how much commission intermediaries earned for selling certain products.
When the FSA takes over as regulator of intermediaries it is likely to focus on the way travel insurance is sold, as it currently accounts for one in eight of all complaints received by the Financial Ombudsman Service.
The watchdog also plans to look at fraud against insurance companies which currently costs the industry, and therefore consumers, around £1bn a year, as well as fraud by intermediaries who, in some cases, take premiums from consumers but not use them to buy cover.
