The first two days of the week - days 51 and 52 at the royal commission into misconduct in the banking and financial services industry - have been notable for the absence of life insurance sector witnesses directly associated with one or another of Australia's major banks.That is likely to change later today, with the arrival in the witness box of Helen Troup, managing director of CommInsure, CBA's insurance arm. The actions of CBA's life insurance subsidiary, Colonial Mutual Life Insurance Society Limited have been highlighted in media reports.Rowena Orr, senior counsel assisting the commissioner, has outlined areas to be further scrutinised: trauma policies that were declined due to medical definitions that were out of date with prevailing medical practice; and the mis-selling of credit card insurance.First up, though, Orr will finish her examination of Craig Orton, the chief operating officer at Freedom Insurance Group Ltd. He was in the witness box for much of day two of the sixth round of hearings, concentrating on the life insurance sector. Orton was previously executive manager of life and group insurance at Suncorp, before taking on the COO role at Freedom in February this year. Orr led him down a similar path to the one she imposed on Gregory Martin, chief actuary and risk officer for the ClearView Group, the previous day and into yesterday morning.Examples of sales manuals were passed around, showing how ClearView sales agents were trained, when someone said they wanted to think about it, to proceed to sign them up and tell them that they could read the policy documents after they had been signed up.Martin agreed that was an entirely inappropriate way of conducting the sale.Clearview suffered from hiring inexperienced compliance staff, who were then added as part of the sale sales teams they were supposed to be monitoring, although impossible to defend or excuse.The story was much the same for Freedom Insurance, accused of spending 18 minutes on the phone allegedly selling a life insurance policy to a young man with Down syndrome.It was not until the royal commission loomed that Baptist minister Bruce Stewart, the father of the boy, was able to get a recording of the sales call, despite asking for two years.The sales agent who had sold the policy had been warned numerous times, but only fined a total of around $2000, which Orton agreed could encourage yet more aggressive selling. Other phone recordings showing how high pressure sales techniques continued to be applied to vulnerable customers, were played to the commission.Orton, who has been in role for not much longer than six months was at pains to show how much he was doing to reverse the toxic sales at all costs culture that he walked into at Freedom."My view is that any commission paid to a sales agent has the potential to cause conflicts [of interest], which is why Freedom is doing away with such commissions [from 30 September]…""We do aim for all calls to go through a quality [test], aiming for