Source: Beijing Business Today
"Reputation" Mechanism to Be Implemented: Insurance Sales Shift Toward Building Trust
Before buying insurance, check the salesperson's "credit background," turning a joke into reality. On 10 month 18, Beijing Business Today learned that the China Insurance Association has issued the "Measures for Building Credit Files for Insurance Sales Personnel" (hereinafter referred to as the "Measures"), which will take effect on 2027 year 1 month 1. Performance evaluations, work achievements, and rewards and penalties—previously hidden in insurers' back-end systems—will now be recorded in the sales personnel's credit files.
At the same time, insurance providers should offer credit status lookup services for insurance sales personnel to consumers, market participants, and industry practitioners, ensuring compliance with laws and regulations while safeguarding information security. How can an industry once defined by its "massive workforce" scale now measure each sales representative through "credit"? With consumers' right to know now grounded in tangible tools, what level will this system elevate insurance sales to?
From "Blacklist" to "User Profile"
The implementation of credit records did not happen out of thin air.
False advertising and deceptive practices against policyholders continue to recur, leaving many insurance agents banned from the industry. At the same time, the individual life insurance force is undergoing a significant contraction. The agent workforce, which peaked at 912 million in 2019, has now fallen to just over 200 million—a loss of nearly 700 million people over six years.
Fewer people, but what should define the quality of those remaining? This remains an unresolved issue. The "Measures" define a credit file as a record of insurance sales personnel's credit information, collected, organized, preserved, and processed by insurance institutions, which are responsible for managing these files. The "Measures" also call for establishing a new industry standard: "Everyone upholds integrity, insurance serves the people."
Against this backdrop, the Measures shift focus from "after problems arise" to earlier prevention. Under the Measures, a credit file comprises four components: basic information, professional status information, credit evaluation data, and public credit information. Metrics reflecting sales quality—such as the 13-month policy renewal rate, long-term policy surrender rate, and complaint rate—are explicitly included in the credit evaluation data.
"With the number of agent-based salespeople dropping from its peak to over 200 and the 2025 individual insurance reform notice mandating that integrity information must not be concealed or falsified, the Measures aim to shift from a 'blacklist logic' to a 'full-employee credit profile.' This provides the data foundation for tiered authorization, commission deferral, and violation recovery. As Long Ge, Co-founder and General Manager of Zhongtuo Bang, stated: 'The goal is to ensure retention within boundaries, track employee mobility, enable correction for失信，and reward trustworthiness with a premium.'"
Regarding the background of the "Measures," Li Chao, an insurance lawyer at Beijing Shaohemingdi Law Firm, stated that misleading sales remain a frequent source of complaints and penalties.
Second, the individual life insurance workforce is shifting from a "mass recruitment model" to one focused on "streamlining and quality enhancement."
Third, the regulatory focus has already shifted toward "integrity information management."
The "Notice on Promoting Deepening the Reform of Individual Marketing Systems in the Life Insurance Industry" issued by the National Financial Regulatory Administration in 2025 clearly stipulates that insurance companies must assume primary responsibility, while the industry association is tasked with establishing and improving mechanisms for managing and utilizing integrity information of insurance sales personnel. According to Li Chao, the issuance of this "Measure" transforms the principle of "utmost good faith" from a slogan into quantifiable, traceable, contestable, and repairable professional credit assets. It integrates four categories of information—basic data, professional status, credit evaluation, and public credit—throughout the entire practice lifecycle.
Before the record leaves with the person
The direction is clear, but moving credit file construction from paper to practice involves numerous operational challenges that must be addressed step by step.
For new hires, signing an authorization is straightforward; the real challenge lies with existing records. Li Chao noted four key issues: First, while new employees can sign authorizations immediately, obtaining written consent from a large volume of current agents and brokerage practitioners requires clear guidelines on execution and handling refusals. Second, since archives are managed by insurance companies, performance pressure may lead to underreporting or downplaying of minor misrepresentations. Third, during the initial phase of cross-institutional data sharing, information silos persist. Although the regulation proposes "gradual" industry-wide exchange, short-term access to records across different companies remains limited. Fourth, it remains unclear whether the maximum retention period for credit files will cover early negative records; specific implementation details still await further clarification from regulators.
Long Ge also noted that key challenges include retroactive authorization for existing employees, the fact that complaints do not equate to loss of trust, historical data reconstruction, and temporary lack of interconnectivity across institutions.
Notably, the credit file mechanism also allows for "correction." The Measures require insurance institutions to establish a credit repair process, defining the conditions and procedures for repair while encouraging insurance sales agents to restore their credit. Additionally, the Measures mandate that institutions implement a quantifiable, traceable, and tiered classification-based credit evaluation system for insurance sales agents. This includes clear evaluation criteria and calculation rules for relevant metrics, regular comprehensive assessments of agents' past credit histories, and classification management—all of which must be recorded in their credit files.
Long Ge suggested modeling based on "attribution of responsibility + negative severity grading," with the association first sharing hard data on professional dishonesty and administrative penalties. Under the remediation mechanism, scenarios such as fraud, forged signatures, and black-market proxy policy surrender should be excluded. Additionally, credit records should not be treated as KPI leaderboards but rather as verifiable professional histories.
Trust Ledger Impacts Both Ends
The ripple effects of policy implementation must ultimately reach both consumers and sales personnel.
In most scenarios, policyholders rely solely on the salesperson's perspective. According to Li Chao, once the new Measures take effect, consumers will benefit from reduced information asymmetry and more informed selection processes. The Measures mandate providing credit status checks for insurance sales personnel, ensuring policyholders are no longer exposed only to one-sided pitches. Going forward, incidents of deception, concealment, or misleading promotion by sales staff will be recorded in a centralized file containing cross-agency mobility, training history, complaints, and disciplinary actions. This will streamline evidence collection should disputes arise.
The balance of information is shifting in favor of consumers, while the scale tips against sales agents. According to Li Chao, creditworthiness will soon impact job security. Individuals with a history of dishonesty, high complaint rates, or misleading practices will face stricter scrutiny during recruitment by new agencies. Conversely, top-performing agents earn a "trust dividend": those with long-term service records, high retention rates, and few complaints find their credit profiles serve as strong endorsements. For the industry, short-term hiring may become more difficult as implicit entry barriers rise, putting continued pressure on individual insurance staffing. Performance evaluations are no longer driven solely by premium volume; business quality and service standards will now be factored into assessments.
The changes on both fronts are not isolated; together, they point to a deeper reality: once credit is verifiable and traceable, the cost structure of sales is fundamentally rewritten. Dr. Longe notes that in the future, consumers will be able to check agents' performance metrics—including retention rates, complaint ratios, and administrative penalties—raising the cost of misleading sales. For agents, "good records travel with you, but gray records can't be erased." However, objection declarations and credit repair mechanisms ensure that a single violation won't result in a lifetime label. In the short term, this affects internal institutional accounting; in the long run, it will force a shift from "who can sell" to "who deserves trust."
Industry insiders note that the impacts on both ends will ultimately reshape competitive dynamics in the market. Beijing Business Today observes that, beyond the "Measures," a series of regulatory requirements and self-regulatory conventions have been implemented in recent years. What truly matters for the market is this shift in competitive logic. As credit becomes a verifiable and comparable professional asset, the old strategy of competing solely on workforce scale may no longer work.
So, where is the future insurance sales market heading? Li Chao states that it will evolve in four key directions: First, a shift from "competing on headcount" to "competing on trust." Historically, hiring more agents meant higher premiums; in the future, companies will vet credentials before signing. The mass-recruitment strategy must end, leaving only professional agents. Second, sales tiers and credit records will integrate. Product segmentation, agent grading, and suitability management are already being implemented. Credit records will complete the "human" dimension—only agents with high professional ratings and strong credit histories will be permitted to sell complex products. Third, corporate accountability for agent conduct will become harder to evade. Institutions will bear responsibility for authorized actions by their agents, a principle reflected in the credit record system. Fourth, the industry faces short-term pain for long-term quality improvement. In the short term, recruitment is difficult, systems are costly, and veteran agents face restructuring. Long-term benefits include restored consumer trust, more stable renewal business, and top-tier sales personnel becoming valuable industry assets.
The evolution of the industry points toward a fundamental reshaping of professional roles. According to Longge, combined with previously released regulations such as the "Insurance Sales Conduct Management Measures," guidelines for determining professional dishonesty, and suitability self-regulation standards, the industry is shifting from an "over-reliance on manpower" strategy to "credit-based pricing." In the future, insurance sales will become a highly regulated profession similar to lawyers or brokers: practitioners will require qualifications, operate under a tiered system, maintain credit scores, and have records accessible across institutions. Meanwhile, small-scale insurance intermediaries and those with weaker systems will be phased out.
Beijing Business Today reporter Hu Yongxin
