Mixing references to eggs and soldiers in a way not seen since news broke of Humpty Dumpty’s tragically brief career in wall sitting, Insurance Times reports this week that ‘a clutch of brokers and insurers broke ranks this week to reveal how much they earn from referral fees.’
Turns out it’s all been a big fuss about nothing! The rank-breaking clutchsters earn scarcely a penny from referral fees. Rank-breakers in chief Allianz netted a pitiful £1.5m last year. They’d probably have made more nipping out with a hat in their lunch hour and banging out Streets of London on a de-tuned ukelele.
Ludicrously named Markerstudy fared worse still, bringing in a woeful £200,000 from referral fees and then bizarrely just giving it all to their brokers. Poor Groupama made just £150,000 from referrals last year, equivalent to a piffling 0.05% of turnover.
Meanwhile fellow under-remunerated rank-buster Arron Banks of Brightside offered the philosophically provocative prediction that insurers will simply buy up law firms once new ownership rules are introduced next year, at which point ‘the question of referral fees is immaterial because it is internalised.’
Presumably, at that point, any law firm foolish enough not to (own or) be owned by an insurance firm will find it harder laying its hands on data pertaining to persons who’ve been personally injured.
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