In the famous movie words of Tom Cruise, Freedom Insurance wants its sales staff to "show me the money!".
Trips to Bali, Vespa scooters, Sydney Harbour cruises and cash have all been used as prizes to aggressively drive sales of insurance.
Sell, sell, sell has been the rallying call in incentive programs at Freedom Insurance in 2017 and 2018.
Cash totalling $100 was up for grabs as encouragement to sell funeral insurance, alongside an image of Cruise shouting "show me the money!" from his 1996 movie Jerry Maguire.
Another campaign used a photo of American rapper 50 Cent holding a stack of cash and offered $150 for the team to "smash 400 lives" insured by lunchtime.
The campaigns were absolutely inappropriate, Freedom chief operating officer Craig Orton told the banking royal commission.
"That will not happen under my watch," he declared on Tuesday.
Mr Orton agreed the incentive campaigns were likely to drive highly aggressive and inappropriate sales practices so agents could meet their targets and be eligible for the money and prizes.
Mr Orton, who joined Freedom in February, was livid about "let's all go to Bali" campaigns,
"I don't believe in these sorts of incentives," he said.
"I don't believe in commissions that are sales or retention-driven."
Freedom is scrapping commissions for its sales agents, accepting it has created incentives for them to aggressively pursue sales.
The remuneration structure has also been linked to the mis-selling of life insurance to vulnerable customers, which included a phone sale to an intellectually disabled Melbourne man with Down syndrome who did not understand what he was buying.
A woman complained in April this year about her mother being sold a policy insuring 29 people.
Mr Orton said there was no indication on the sales call that the woman was vulnerable and she was asked if the policy was affordable.
"But regardless of that, I'm not justifying it because no one should ever have 29 people put on their policy."
Mr Orton agreed the sales agent maximised their commission by getting additional lives on the policy.
Freedom will stop selling some types of insurance through cold calls, amid pressure from the regulator.
But it will still use cold calls to sell its biggest money-earner, funeral insurance, which accounts for 85 per cent of its business.
It will also continue selling tens of thousands of accidental death insurance policies a year, just not through cold calls, despite the Australian Securities and Investments Commission demanding insurers ditch the low-value policy.
The royal commission heard another ASX-listed company, ClearView, planned to offer staff a trip to Queenstown as a prize amid a frenzied sales push, despite knowing it breached the law.
It heard the head of ClearView Direct deceptively decided to package the New Zealand incentive campaign as a training or educational trip to circumvent regulations banning conflicted remuneration.
ClearView's chief actuary and risk officer Greg Martin declared the 2016 promotion would be "over my dead body" and it did not proceed.
ClearView has shut its direct sales business.
