Matthew Hill, who took up the reins as CEO of the Chartered Insurance Institute earlier this year, has stressed the importance of value for the insurance industry – both in the products it offers and the proposition it presents to potential recruits.

Hill said: “What you are doing, as a customer of insurance in personal lines for example, is paying into a fund that helps people when things go wrong. And there's something, I think, very profound about that. So, when I pay for my house insurance, I'm not paying with the expectation that my house is going to burn down (touch wood), but in the knowledge that if somebody else's house burns down, they will be helped, and they will help me if my house gets burned down. And the insurance industry is a means of sort of facilitating that social bargain.”

He added: “I think the job of the CII, and everybody involved in the profession, is to find ways to articulate the value that insurance adds that appeals to people, so that when young people are thinking about the careers that they want to go in to, there's something that they can connect with… Can't we find a way to persuade young people that they want to become insurance professionals or financial planners because they want to help people?”