The trend of insurance companies entering the intermediary sector is no longer a novelty.

This is especially true for top-tier insurers, which have not only expanded their partnerships with external brokers in recent years but have also, through equity investments and other means, personally stepped in to build and strengthen their own intermediary channels.

Although the intermediary market is currently in a downturn, with many firms facing survival crises, it is undeniable that these channels hold an irreplaceable and important position in the entire insurance industry chain.

For an insurer to own an intermediary company offers unique advantages, such as enhancing channel control, improving business stability, and facilitating comprehensive financial services.

Many insurance companies in mature markets have long operated their own intermediary institutions, and many of these insurer-owned intermediaries consistently rank among the top performers.

This demonstrates the principle that "a capable leader never has weak subordinates."

The 2026 global MDRT rankings further confirm this characteristic: among intermediaries with the highest number of MDRT members, insurer-licensed intermediaries, leveraging mature wealth management operations, professional advisor development mechanisms, and long-term client engagement models, occupy nearly half of the top spots. They are firmly established in the first tier of high-productivity global institutions, serving as the core vehicle for insurers to accumulate client assets, forge professional teams, and build long-term competitive moats.

In the domestic Chinese insurance market, however, most insurers' own intermediaries are still mired in development difficulties characterized by being "channel-driven tools, short-term sales focus, single-service offerings, and extensive agent management."

At this critical crossroads of industry transformation, re-clarifying the underlying strategic logic for insurers to build their own intermediaries, benchmarking against mature overseas operational paradigms, reviewing domestic shortcomings, and constructing a localized path for advancement have become key issues for domestic insurers to break through growth bottlenecks and achieve wealth management transformation.

Strategic Rationale: The Core Logic for Insurers to Build Their Own Intermediaries: Full Lifecycle Client Asset Accumulation and Core Talent Retention

In the wealth management era, the core competitive factors in the insurance industry have shifted from "product pricing and channel scale" to "customer lifetime value, professional advisor capabilities, and comprehensive service systems."

In recent years, leading domestic insurers have also been vigorously building their intermediary channels. For example, Ping An Insurance (Group) Company of China Ltd's subsidiary, Ping An Chuangzhan, achieved premium income of RMB 5.69 billion in 2024, ranking second only to Ant Insurance (owned by Ant Group) among national insurance intermediaries. Other companies like China Pacific Insurance (Group) Co., Ltd have also seen positive development in recent years.

An insurer's decision to build its own licensed intermediary is far from a simple channel expansion or premium supplement. It is a strategic deployment based on evolving customer needs, changes in the industry ecosystem, and the retention of core resources. The essence is to complete a fundamental shift from "product sales management" to "client asset management."

Adapting to Evolving Customer Needs and Extending the Full Lifecycle Service Chain

Traditional insurance operating models are characterized by "single transactions and short-term service." Customer needs are limited to basic risk protection like critical illness, life insurance, medical insurance, and auto insurance, with the service loop ending at policy issuance and basic claims. However, the financial needs of current high-net-worth families and middle-class groups have become long-cycle, diversified, and comprehensive, covering scenarios such as youth risk protection, education fund planning for young adults, middle-age retirement reserves, family asset allocation, tax optimization, corporate risk isolation, and family wealth succession.

A single insurance product can only solve a partial problem in a family's risk management and cannot meet the client's comprehensive financial planning needs. Consequently, an insurer's existing clients will continuously lose ground to third-party independent brokerage firms, private banking divisions of banks, public and private equity wealth platforms, and independent financial advisor teams. This leads to the attrition of years of accumulated customer data and client assets.

An insurer-owned intermediary, as an independently licensed and professionally operated service entity, can build a service system that spans the client's entire life. It provides clients with a wealth of wealth management and health/medical services, transforming a single policy transaction into decades of long-term service, thereby maximizing the value of the client's full lifecycle.

Locking in Existing Client Assets and Building a High-Stickiness Customer Barrier

The traditional domestic agency system has a fatal operational flaw: client resources are highly dependent on the individual agent, and the institution's control over and service penetration to clients is extremely weak. The loss of an agent often leads to a mass exodus of clients, trapping the institution in a vicious cycle of "training people but not retaining them, and attracting clients but not keeping them."

An insurer-owned intermediary, with its advantages of being an independent legal entity, having independent service qualifications, and an independent operating system, can achieve the institutionalization of client resources, standardization of the service system, and normalization of continued service. By building a dedicated client service center, standardized service processes, and a full-cycle client maintenance system, client files, needs data, service records, and asset allocation plans can all be stored at the institutional level, completely breaking the dependence on individual salespeople. Even if an advisor leaves, the platform can seamlessly take over the client's subsequent service, effectively reducing the client churn rate. This continuously enhances client willingness to repurchase, provide referrals, and increase coverage, creating a hard-to-replicate client stickiness barrier.

Meeting the Advanced Needs of Elite Talent and Retaining Core Industry Productivity

Against the backdrop of industry transformation, the career aspirations of high-quality insurance practitioners and top MDRT producers have fundamentally changed. They are no longer limited to short-term sales commissions but seek compliant practice qualifications, professional skill advancement, comprehensive service authorization, long-term career development, and platform brand empowerment. Traditional agency channels, often constrained by business boundaries, product systems, and training systems, can only handle single-product insurance sales, failing to meet the needs of elite advisors wanting to transition into comprehensive financial planners, family financial advisors, or high-net-worth wealth consultants.

An insurer-owned intermediary, leveraging its multi-license advantages, can expand into comprehensive business areas like wealth management, asset allocation, and retirement planning. It offers practitioners a broader business scope, a more complete growth path, and more professional empowerment. This makes it the core stronghold for the insurer to retain its top-performing teams and cultivate high-productivity advisory teams.

Overseas Benchmark: The Mature Dual-Model Operational System and Core Logic of U.S. Insurer Intermediaries

Looking at the global MDRT rankings for 2025-2026, U.S. insurance-affiliated Broker-Dealer institutions hold a dominant position at the top. For instance, NYLife Securities LLC, a subsidiary of New York Life Insurance Company, has 371 MDRT members. Northwestern Mutual Investment Services, under Northwestern Mutual, has 202 MDRT members. State Farm VP Management Corp, a subsidiary of the property & casualty company State Farm, has 94 MDRT members. Each company has its own unique operational characteristics. For example, Northwestern Mutual Investment Services encourages advisors to help clients with comprehensive planning, while NYLife Securities LLC focuses more on building its advisor talent system.

Overall, two mature operational paradigms, validated over decades in the market, have emerged. U.S. life and property & casualty insurers have found pathways suitable for two distinct tracks: wealth deepening in life insurance and cross-selling in property & casualty insurance. Although these two models have different business focuses, they both transcend the single role of "product distribution," achieving the wealth-oriented, professional, and long-term operation of the intermediary platform.

Mutual Life Insurance Wealth Platforms: New York Life, Northwestern Mutual, and MassMutual

These three institutions are all century-old mutual life insurance giants. Their securities brokerage and wealth management intermediary platforms have consistently ranked in the top ten in MDRT membership for years. They serve as a benchmark paradigm for the wealth-oriented transformation of insurance intermediaries globally, possessing three core common characteristics that form their barriers to high productivity, high retention, and high value:

First, a restructured service logic: starting with financial planning and using insurance as a supporting tool for wealth management.

The platform completely abandons the traditional "product push, sales script" logic and establishes a service system centered on "client needs first, holistic planning as the core." The advisor's primary action is not to promote an insurance product but to thoroughly investigate the client's family income and expenditure structure, asset and liability levels, risk exposure, life stage goals, and retirement and succession needs. They then produce a customized family financial plan and match it with diverse financial tools such as life insurance, annuities, mutual funds, securities investments, and retirement accounts. Insurance products are no longer the core of sales but a standardized supporting module within the family's risk management and wealth preservation system. For instance, Northwestern Mutual Investment Services believes that insurance is a part of wealth management, not the whole. The company requires advisors to first help clients establish a complete financial plan, including cash flow analysis, risk management, asset allocation, tax planning, retirement income design, and wealth succession arrangements. Based on this, they then allocate life insurance, long-term care insurance, annuities, and investment products according to different needs. Consequently, within the company, advisors are more often defined as Financial Advisors, not insurance agents, signifying a fundamental change in service content and professional positioning.

Second, an upgraded practitioner positioning: professional financial advisor system and a heavy-asset development mechanism.

The platform uniformly defines practitioners as Financial Advisors, completely stripping away the low-end label of "insurance salesperson." Leveraging the advantages of the mutual structure, they operate without the pressure of short-term profit targets and continuously invest heavily in building a full-cycle talent development system. This includes systematic new-hire training, one-on-one mentorship from senior advisors, case study reviews, and ongoing professional certification programs, mandating that practitioners obtain high-value financial qualifications like CFP and CLU. Simultaneously, they cultivate a strong MDRT culture, creating a healthy talent ecosystem where "senior members mentor newcomers, professionals teach skills, and top performers grow together."

Third, an upgraded business system: insurance fully embedded in a full-category wealth management ecosystem.

Leveraging their multi-license qualifications in securities, funds, and asset management, the platform connects a full chain of services, including risk protection, asset investment, retirement planning, tax planning, wealth succession, and family offices, building a one-stop comprehensive financial services system. The service cycle spans decades of the client's life, providing dynamic services as the client's wealth accumulates, family structure evolves, and needs upgrade. This creates a long-term symbiotic model of "client growth – asset appreciation – advisor income increase," significantly enhancing client loyalty and team stability.

Property & Casualty Insurance Cross-Selling Platforms: State Farm and Farmers

Represented by the intermediaries of two major U.S. P&C insurance giants, these platforms form a differentiated model for deep penetration of the existing client base. Their core logic is to use high-frequency, essential P&C services as a traffic entry point, leveraging the intermediary platform to achieve life-P&C linkage, wealth extension, and deep mining of the existing client base. By using high-frequency scenarios like auto insurance, home insurance, and commercial insurance to accumulate a vast mass-market clientele, the platform then extends into life protection, annuity management, retirement planning, and small-scale asset allocation, achieving second and third rounds of deep value extraction from the existing client base. This model has core advantages of low customer acquisition costs, high customer penetration rates, and strong scenario stickiness, creating a unique sustainable growth system for P&C insurance intermediaries. For example, State Farm uses its basic auto insurance business to build the client entry point, and some of its agents then upgrade to offer more complex financial services.

Overall, the core success logic of U.S. insurer-owned intermediaries is relatively unified: the intermediary is an independent client wealth service platform, not just a distribution channel for the parent company's products; the core of the business is long-term client value, not short-term premium scale; and the core asset is the professional advisor team, not channel traffic.

Domestic Status Quo: The Deep-Seated Causes and Industry Pain Points of the Lagging Transformation of Insurer-Owned Intermediaries

Overall, the large-scale deployment of insurer-owned intermediaries in China has been a relatively short cycle. There is a clear gap in strategic positioning, system construction, and operational philosophy compared to mature U.S. wealth platforms. They have not yet formed a sustainable, professional, and value-generating operational capability, and their growth rates are also average. Using Ping An Chuangzhan and Pacific Insurance Agency as examples, the two companies achieved insurance premium income of RMB 5.69 billion and RMB 1.16 billion in 2024, with year-on-year growth of 5.62% and -2.2%, respectively.

Overall, the core issues for domestic insurer-owned intermediaries currently center on four dimensions.

Strategic Positioning: Channel Instrumentalization vs. Platform Value Creation

U.S. insurers position their owned intermediaries as independent client management and wealth service platforms with independent authority for product selection, solution customization, and client service. In contrast, the primary initial motivation for the vast majority of domestic insurers to establish an intermediary is to serve as a supplementary export channel for the parent company's insurance products. The goal is to offload channel pressure, offset premium scale, and circumvent channel regulatory restrictions. In essence, they are "off-balance-sheet sales channels." This leads to resource conflicts between the intermediary team and the exclusive agent team within the same insurance company, and the value they create is relatively thin and unsustainable.

Organizational Form: Sales Team Attributes vs. Professional Service Attributes

Top U.S. intermediaries are standardized, professional, and comprehensive financial service institutions whose core function is client financial planning and wealth management. Domestic insurer-owned intermediaries, however, have not yet shed their traditional sales organization form. Their organizational structure, job responsibilities, and service processes are a complete replica of the agency channel, with core functions limited to policy sales, new client acquisition, and performance sprints. At the same time, these institutions lack professional teams and standardized processes for client needs assessment, risk diagnosis, asset allocation, financial planning, and value-added after-sales services. They are unable to provide customized, comprehensive financial solutions for clients. Client service remains at a basic level, such as policy maintenance and claims assistance, making it difficult to meet the increasingly diverse wealth needs of residents. The service value-add is low.

Lack of a Talent Development System: Short-Term Incentives Dominate, Professional Skills are Missing

The domestic insurance industry has long formed a talent management model of "valuing incentives over training, and short-term results over long-term growth." This problem is particularly pronounced in the owned intermediary systems of insurers. In terms of compensation structure, practitioner income is heavily reliant on first-year commissions, with a low proportion of renewal service commissions and long-term client management subsidies. This naturally guides teams to pursue quick, short-term closures, neglecting long-term client service and deep engagement. In terms of training systems, industry training generally focuses on product terms, sales scripts, and lead generation techniques, lacking professional courses on family financial planning, asset allocation, tax planning, wealth succession, and risk modeling. Furthermore, systematic mentorship systems, tiered career paths, and incentives for professional qualifications are generally absent. Practitioners have no clear direction for career advancement, often relying solely on personal networks and single-product sales to maintain performance. Professional skills cannot be accumulated sustainably, making it difficult to grow into qualified comprehensive financial advisors.

Obvious Product Homogeneity: Limited Support for Subsidiary Intermediaries

Currently, product homogeneity is a significant trend among domestic insurance companies, and their wealth management systems remain relatively underdeveloped. This leads to a situation where the subsidiary intermediaries struggle on the supply side to offer clients products and protection plans that fully meet their needs. Client service remains largely homogeneous and singular, which further widens the gap between domestic insurer-owned intermediaries and their mature counterparts in the U.S.

Path to Advancement: A Plan for the Professional, Value-Oriented, and Platform-Based Transformation of Domestic Insurer-Owned Intermediaries

Although the domestic insurance regulatory environment, client structure, and industry ecosystem differ significantly from the U.S. market, making it impossible to directly copy overseas mature models, we can still deeply learn from their underlying logic of client centricity, professional core, service comprehensiveness, and long-term management. By combining this with the current state of the domestic industry, we can build a localized transformation system from four dimensions: positioning, talent, service, and performance assessment.

Reshaping Top-Level Positioning: Establishing the Intermediary's Independent Client Service Value

First, domestic insurer-owned intermediaries must break the entrenched perception of "intermediary as product channel." They must clearly define the owned intermediary as an independent client wealth service platform, a professional advisor cultivation platform, and a comprehensive financial service delivery platform. The core operating principle should be "client needs take priority over product sales, and long-term value takes priority over short-term scale." In terms of operational authority, the intermediary should be given independent authority for client needs assessment, service solution customization, and product selection. The parent company's insurance products serve as a core service module, but not the only service content or mandatory sales content. Products and services should be flexibly configured based on the client's true needs. For instance, some U.S. insurer-owned intermediaries, when faced with diverse client needs, can proactively apply to the parent insurer to seek selling products from other companies that are more suitable for the client, thereby fully satisfying the client's requirements. In client management, an institutional-level client service center should be built to institutionalize client resources, service data, and service systems, completely breaking dependence on individual salespeople and ensuring the continuity and professionalism of client service.

Building a Tiered Talent Development System to Create a Professional Advisor Growth Ecosystem

Second, referring to the talent development logic of top U.S. institutions and combining it with the growth patterns of domestic practitioners, a layered, graded, and systematic full-cycle growth path should be built, supported by a complete mechanism for training, certification, incentives, and promotion:

Newcomer Stage: Focus on developing skills in client communication logic, family risk analysis, basic financial knowledge, compliant practice norms, and basic protection product matching. Strengthen foundational abilities through mentor accompaniment, case study reviews, and simulation exercises. Cultivate a client service mindset rather than a pure sales mentality.

Mature/Advanced Stage: Focus on strengthening capabilities in comprehensive family financial planning, cash flow projection, retirement asset allocation, and medium-to-long-term wealth management. Establish a subsidy mechanism for professional qualifications, encouraging practitioners to obtain certifications like CFP, AFP, actuarial science, and wealth management. Target the cultivation of comprehensive service capabilities for middle-class families.

Top Elite Stage: Focus on high-net-worth clients and business owner clientele. Deepen expertise in tax optimization, corporate risk isolation, family wealth succession, cross-border asset allocation, and family office services. Simultaneously, open up advancement channels such as team management, studio operations, and institutional training to create a talent pool of versatile high-end wealth advisors and management professionals.

Furthermore, a full-time mentor responsibility system must be implemented, incorporating the retention, skill improvement, and team professionalism of new members into the mentor's assessment to build a sustainable talent mentorship ecosystem, replicating the healthy MDRT talent cycle seen overseas.

Building an Open, Comprehensive Service System to Broaden the Full Lifecycle Service Boundary

Third, the industry must break free from the limitations of single-product insurance services and build a "risk protection + wealth management + value-added services" trinity comprehensive service system, fully adapting to the full spectrum of client needs. At the basic level, perfect the full-category risk protection product system, including life insurance, health insurance, annuities, and property insurance. At the advanced level, extend into services like health management, medical green channels, access to senior living communities, long-term care planning, and retirement cash flow management. At the high-end level, compliantly deploy high-end services such as tax consulting, asset allocation, corporate risk management, and family wealth succession.

At the same time, accelerate the construction of digital platforms. Leverage intelligent CRM systems, risk assessment tools, AI financial planning models, and data analysis systems to provide comprehensive back-office support for advisors. This will significantly reduce administrative, compliance, and product research costs, allowing advisors to focus their core energy on in-depth client communication, needs discovery, and long-term management, thereby comprehensively improving service efficiency and professionalism.

Restructuring a Multi-Dimensional Performance Assessment System to Achieve a Shift from Scale-Oriented to Value-Oriented

Finally, the industry as a whole must change the single premium-based performance assessment mechanism. It needs to establish a composite assessment system that balances short-term scale stability with long-term value cultivation, reshaping the operational direction of institutions and teams. In the short term, set reasonable basic indicators like premium scale and new client acquisition to ensure the stability of the institution's fundamentals. In the long term, significantly increase the weight of core indicators such as the 3-5-year client retention rate, repurchase rate, referral rate, service satisfaction, the quality of delivered financial planning solutions, and the advisor team retention rate. Simultaneously, optimize the compensation incentive structure, increasing the proportion of renewal service commissions, long-term client management rewards, professional qualification subsidies, and referral incentives. This will weaken the dominance of short-term first-year commissions, guiding teams to abandon short-term speculative thinking and establish a long-term client management mindset, thereby building a stable, professional, and sustainable high-productivity advisory team.

Final Thoughts

In the future, the transformation of insurer-owned intermediaries in China is not a simple matter of copying models or upgrading tools. It is a top-down strategic restructuring, a conceptual revolution, and a systemic reshaping. Future competition in the insurance industry will completely move away from low-level product price wars and channel scale competition. It will upgrade to a competition in professional advisor capabilities, comprehensive service systems, and the management of client lifetime value. For insurance companies, an owned intermediary that can continuously cultivate professional advisor teams, meticulously manage the full lifecycle needs of clients, and provide comprehensive wealth services will no longer be a sales channel dependent on the parent company. Instead, it will become a top-tier strategic asset that supports the company's long-term, high-quality development and builds a core competitive moat in the industry. Only by completing this deep transformation can domestic insurers truly embrace the wealth management era and achieve the upgrade from insurance sales institutions to comprehensive financial wealth service providers.