Catlin Group chief executive officer Stephen Catlin yesterday called for more transparency from insurance brokers.The boss of the Bermuda-based re/insurer estimated that his firm paid £425 million ($688 million) on “process” done by brokers without knowing what they were paying for.Brokers seek to find insurers to cover the risks of their clients. Speaking at the Insurance Day Summit in London yesterday, Mr Catlin said it was the underwriters who tended to get charged for the brokers’ work, rather than the brokers’ customers. Payments from insurers to brokers some of which are known as “contingent commissions” have often been criticised in the past as a conflict of interests. Mr Catlin insisted that underwriters should not be expected to pay for everything the broker does.“I do absolutely believe the broker deserves to make a good profit for what he does with the distribution of business but I think he should learn to be competitive and transparent about the processes that he does, so that we can see what he does for whom and what it’s costing,” Mr Catlin said, according to Insurance Day.“We have no transparency of what they do. We don’t know if they’re efficient. There is no other counterparty that we have with which we don’t sit down at the beginning of the year and agree a service level agreement. Unless we get to that kind of transparency I don’t think we’re going to move forward.”In his industry experience of nearly 40 years, Mr Catlin said “contingent commissions eventually always end in tears”.“In all that time I’ve never worked out how insurance brokers can carry on conducting business and describing it in the way they do,” he added.Calling for a fundamental change, Mr Catlin said: “The broking community needs to learn to sell a fee to his client in the same way it knows how to broke to the underwriter which he is very good at.”