Marsh's jollies smokescreen
Am I being cynical in finding Marsh's new ethical guidelines (Marsh: no cap on corporate jollies, Insurance Times 30 June, p3) a convenient blind from the true ethical issues they face of conflict of interest, giving their customers value and of steering business towards friendly insurers. The clients that I work with continue to express over about what the big brokers earn and how they earn it.
By focusing attention on trivial ethical issues, like whether to accept a golf day or a T-shirt, the broker appears to care about its behaviour while plainly not wishing to take any ethical steps that will impact their profitability, by introducing complete transparency to their business model and earnings. I find it almost impossible to believe that overriders and profit commissions have disappeared from Marsh's model and I suspect they are not dead but merely sleeping.
Asking such large and powerful entities to monitor themselves with regard to the conflicts of interest, as the FSA has done, is clearly unlikely to do little more than the equivalent of arranging they their into a neat and tidy formation. Confidence and credibility have been lost, but I see little comfort for worried insurance buyers to know that Marsh is agonising over whether to let staff accept T-shirts.
Justin Musson
Corporate insurance advisory,
Financial sector advisory practice,
KPMG (UK)
