If you’ve ever seen the movie “The Big Short”, with Brad Pitt, Christian Bale, Ryan Gosling and Steve Carrell amongst the glittering cast, you know it’s an utterly compelling yet disturbing exposé of some of the events which led up to the financial crash in the closing years of the last decade and, in particular, some of the outrageous behaviour of American financial institutions which made the crash inevitable.

Today, some outrageous behaviour by a company operating here in Ireland was revisited on Liveline, with Joe Duffy.

The company in question was Combined Insurance. And if you’re not familiar with a 2011 Central Bank judgement in relation to the company, Joe was on hand to remind you. Check out the end of this article for those jaw dropping revelations.

Some agents of the firm, recklessly, negligently and deliberately misled customers.
Informing customers they were eligible for cover when the tied agents selling the policy was aware that the relevant customer had a pre-existing medical condition which would make them ineligible.

For these indiscretions, and more (see below), the central bank imposed the biggest fine in its history on Combined Insurance, a €3.35 million penalty.

That was 2011. But this afternoon, Joe Duffy heard a plethora of stories in relation to the beleaguered company, some of them funny, some of them downright infuriating and tragic.

Let’s start with the funny. How Combined Insurance took their name literally and combined the definition of its customers into all living things, including one former employee's pet dog.

Here's the story, from a man identified on the show as John, from Donegal. And this deserves a listen.

“The sales pressure was tremendous altogether. It got to the stage that, I had a dog, and my dog had a policy.”

Seriously?

“I remember a lad I knew that worked for them. And he came to me. He says, “I’m going for a sales award this week and I only need one more policy. One more policy. I said, sorry, but I have one, my wife has one. He said, “does your dog have a policy?” I said, “of course not!” He said, “I'll pay for the policy, can I put her name down?” And that’s what he did, to make up his quota.”

If you’re wondering, the dog’s name was Sona. And she became the latest member of the family to have an insurance policy, adopting, of course, John’s own surname.

All this was part of the outrageous pressure put on sales staff throughout the company. And if you exceeded your targets, according to John, you rose up the management ladder quite quickly, sharing the bonus rewards of those beneath you.

Nothing illegal, he was keen to stress. Just pressure, pressure, pressure to rack up more sales.

Well, all of that was exposed in the Central Bank report in 2011. But Combined Insurance is back in the news now, courtesy of Liveline, and following the receipt by many of its customers of a very distressing letter in the last few days.

Combined insurance have now, according to Joe, left “high and dry” a significant number of Irish policyholders who took out critical illness cover around 1999/2000. Although they haven’t had reason to claim, they have now been told the policies and premiums are gone.

To hear some of their stories, listen back to today’s Liveline.

But back to those jaw dropping revelations, from the Central Bank report in 2011. Are you ready?

  • Some tied agents of the firm acted dishonestly, unfairly and professionally.
  • Wrongly obtaining customers' bank account details and using them to set up policies in other people’s names.
  • Collecting premiums from customers and either failing to set up the new policies for which those premiums were intended or failing to apply the premiums for the benefit of those customers existing policies.
  • Using existing customers' bank account details to set up additional policies for those customers without their knowledge or permission.
  • Some agents of the firm, recklessly, negligently and deliberately misled customers.

To hear more from Liveline with Joe Duffy, click here.