Show a recruit what second-year agents actually earn

I believe the most important document a life insurer gives a prospective agent is not the contract or the commission schedule but an honest account of what people like them have earned. My position is specific. Before anyone in China signs an agency contract with an insurer, they should be shown the distribution of monthly income for agents in their thirteenth to twenty-fourth months with that company, including the median and the lowest quarter, and the share of each recent intake still active a year after joining. At Songbai we have done this since 2022. It has reduced the number of people who join, and I think it is the most useful thing we have done for the conduct of our sales force.

This is not an argument that agency selling is a poor career. For some people it is a good one, and our best agents earn more than most of our head-office staff. It is an argument about informed choice, which our industry demands for its customers and has rarely offered to the people it recruits.

The career was sold like a policy

For two decades the individual agency model in China grew through recruitment. Each winter, ahead of the start-of-year sales campaign the industry calls kaimenhong, branches held recruitment meetings that looked a great deal like sales seminars. The speakers were the agency's top earners. The slides showed incomes from the head of the leaderboard, overseas incentive trips and the path to team director. Recruits were offered a monthly allowance for their first few months if they met a modest sales threshold, and the easiest way to meet it was to buy a policy for themselves or a relative.

I helped run campaigns of this kind at Dongyuan's head office in the early 2010s, and I do not want to describe them as cynical. Most of the people involved believed in the career because it had worked for them. But a recruitment meeting that shows only the top of the distribution is an illustration, and our industry knows what happens when illustrations are optimistic. In 2021, at Songbai, 9% of new agents were still selling thirteen months after joining. About 38% of their first-year business was written on their own lives or their families', and those policies lapsed at almost twice the rate of other agency business. Many recruits left with a policy bought to qualify for an allowance, and with a story about insurance that they told to everyone they knew.

When agency numbers contracted across the industry from about 2020, many people described the fall as a loss of capacity. Some of it was. Much of it was the departure of people who had never had a realistic chance of earning a living from the work, and who should not have been recruited on the terms they were offered.

Publish the distribution, not the leaderboard

Since 2022 every applicant to Songbai's agency receives, before the assessment at the end of the preparation course, a one-page statement prepared by my team from our own records. It shows the monthly income of agents in their second year with us, by quartile, for the most recent full year. It shows how many of the previous year's intake were still active at thirteen months. It shows what share of a typical first-year income came from commission and what share came from allowances, which we no longer pay. The statement is the same in every province, with an added provincial line where the figures differ materially.

In the 2025 statement, the median second-year agent earned about RMB 6,200 a month before tax, the lowest quarter earned less than RMB 2,500 and the top tenth earned more than RMB 24,000. Those figures are not encouraging for someone who needs a stable income quickly, and they are not meant to be. About a third of applicants who reach that point decide not to continue. Our team leaders disliked the statement at first because it made recruiting harder. Several now use it in their first conversation with a candidate, on the grounds that a recruit who stays after reading it is one they will not lose in March.

The statement sits inside a wider change. We replaced the allowance with a training stipend paid for completing the course, and with an assessment that includes a recorded needs-analysis conversation with a trained role-player. Only teams whose managers keep more than a quarter of their recruits for thirteen months may recruit at all. Thirteen-month retention of new agents has risen from 9% to 31%, and the share of new agents' business written on their own families has fallen to 7%.

What an honest offer costs, and what it keeps

The costs are real and I would not hide them from a board. Our agency is smaller than it would otherwise be, and in 2022 we wrote about RMB 1.1 billion less first-year premium than our original plan assumed. About 2,300 of our 9,400 team leaders left within eighteen months, many because their incomes had depended on the size of their teams. Some competitors recruited people we had declined, and some of those people did well.

There are serious objections. An income distribution can discourage capable people who would have succeeded, particularly those from backgrounds where an uncertain income is unfamiliar. A median for the second year hides the fact that agents who stay for three years usually earn considerably more. And a statement prepared by the company can itself be selective. We have answered the last point by asking internal audit to check the figures each year, and the first two by adding the third-year median and short accounts, written by agents, of what changed for them.

The case does not rest on conduct alone, although conduct matters. China's financial regulator has steadily raised its expectations of how insurers manage their agents, and an insurer answers for what its agents tell customers. A recruit who joins on an honest picture of the career is less likely to sell their first policies to relatives under pressure, and more likely to describe a product accurately to a stranger. The economics hold up too. Average monthly first-year premium per active agent at Songbai rose from RMB 5,300 in 2021 to RMB 15,800 in 2025, and the persistency of agency business improved with it.

I would ask any life insurer's board to request one page: the income distribution of its second-year agents, the thirteen-month retention of its last three intakes and the share of new agents' early business written on their own families. Then ask whether a recruit sees the same page before signing. If not, the board should ask why the company holds its customers to a standard of disclosure that it does not apply to the people who sell to them.