The Swedish insurance companies developed – in line with other Scandinavian countries – an unique kind of distribution system for selling insurance products. The origin of the Swedish insurance market was built on inspiration from in particular from United Kingdom and Germany when the first joint-stock company Skandia was founded in the 1850s. Swedish insurers copied among other things, insurance contracts, premium calculation schemes and organising agent networks. In line with these corporations, each insurance company established regionally based networks of agents with a general agent and a large number of subordinated agents. However, in the Scandinavian setting, the emergency of independent brokers was haltered by an interesting dilemma. Early on, agents used something called ‘returned commission’ where they offered potential customers to get a portion of the agents’s commission. This often led to that customers signed life insurance contracts with higher insurance sums and after some time the could not keep on paying the premium and had to cancel the contract. Due to the social element of life insurance, and the existence of so-called returned commission, cancelled contracts could jeopardize the legitimacy of the entire market. The only measure – according to the trade organizations – to control the agentswas to keep the system with that each insurers had their own employed agents. Thereby, the emergency of independent brokers did not developed on the Swedish insurance market.

In this paper we will follow the distribution system for the insurance industry during the 19th and 20th centuries until today and describe how the system was relative stable until the 1980s through legislation but also supported by formal cartelization and gentlemen’s agreement on the market. In particular one cartel agreement, that was implemented in the 1910s that focused on the agent system that changed repeatedly until the 1980s – and fundament of the entire distribution system – will be discussed. The paper will focus on the major changes that occurred from the 1980s and onwards, in particular in connection of the accession to the European Union in the 1990s that entirely changed the distribution system on the market.