Research and Data Services:

Providing market intelligence

Chatswood serves the life and health insurance sector in New Zealand with market intelligence, data, and bespoke consulting services. Some of these are provided in conjunction with Quality Product Research Limited, a subsidiary.

We believe that good decisions are more likely to occur when we have good information about the market environment in which we operate.  Intuitive leaps, and creative decisions are always required, of course, but the more they are based on a firm foundation of observation, the better they tend to be.

Market intelligence products:

  • Life Insurance Premium Comparison: Over a million Life, Trauma, TPD, Income Protection, and Mortgage Protection price comparison points

  • Health Insurance Premium Comparison: Health or Medical pricing database

  • Adviser Remuneration Comparison: Terms, comparison spreadsheet, plus analysis of services offered and remuneration methods for hundreds of advice providers

  • Quarterly Life and Health insurance sector review: Our most popular market information product, covering key indicators, recent news, and expert analysis for the sector

  • Quarterly Life and Health insurance market data: Essential data for product managers and marketers covering every aspect of product quoting

  • Chatswood Pulse: An overview snapshot of last week’s quote activity by company and product segment

  • Data for digital: Enabling digital advice through sum assured and economic data provision

 Frequently used management consulting engagements:

  • Market review: New services often require context. Our data-based approach and library of market analysis means we are ideally placed to prepare a robust and comprehensive market review. Suitable for external investors, audit purposes, presentation to board, and your most valuable distribution partners.

  • Adviser research: Through working with hundreds of advisers Chatswood has the relationships needed to engage with advisers to discuss individually or in focus groups, and test your proposed product, remuneration, and strategy changes. This work can either be in close co-ordination with you or on a no-names basis.  

  • Strategic alliance evaluation and agreement planning: Choosing what services you develop and with which partners is one of the most difficult decisions. Our regular engagement across the market means we can contribute perspective to these choices. . 

  • Benchmarking and review: Establishing a benchmark for product and price performance relative to the market and testing your offer against that in a robust way is one of the best tools for product line management. We do this very well.

  • Digital advice process review: A rich understanding of different advice models across a range of channels to help you navigate the change to digital advice. We have experience with digital advice processes, models, and excellent proprietary data sets with which to validate them.

  • Product development: full range of services for new life and living benefits product development from ideation, development, testing, systems requirements, to channel selection, launch, and review.

  • Change management: by bringing an external view to the process of managing for change we can help your organisation avoid groupthink. We offer a different perspective for the evaluation of options for change. We like to use a variety of predictive approaches and modelling, and include as much factual information from our data products as we can in future-casting. 

Premium Comparison: Life, Trauma, TPD, IP, MP and level premium products

One of our most popular services. Our review of industry pricing enables rapid comparison of prices from all the leading life companies offering their products through financial advisers. It enables comparison on a large scale and includes many powerful analysis tools. Graphical depictions of the data make exploration of pricing positions and inefficiency easy. Data is provided in either MS Access, Tableau, or Excel form. We are also happy to connect our data supply to other actuarial analytical tools you may choose to use. Subscribers enjoy the ability to specify their own bundles of the combinations of cover that they most want to track and have those supplied. Updates are usually within days of a change in the market. Subsets of data for those interested in just direct or bank offers are also available. Support hours are included in the subscription service. This service has pricing history reaching back to 2009.

1.6m+ observations, charts and tools – Life, TPD, Trauma, and IP.

Premium Comparison: Medical or Health Insurance

The medical comparison database allows extensive comparison of medical product pricing for companies distributing through intermediaries. Data tables cover basic, basic plus specialists and tests, couples, couples with children, with and without policy fees, for a range of excess options and includes policy fee and minimum premium data. Available in the same forms as the life premium comparison above. Also supplied with support. If you subscribe to both services then we are happy to provide you with combinations of life and medical insurance benefits as part of the service. This service has pricing history reaching back to 2009.

32,000+ observations, charts, and tools – medical insurance.

Adviser Remuneration Review

Our commission terms survey makes it easy to dynamically review the ways the commission terms offered to financial advisers by life companies vary depending on business size, persistency, business mix, and so on. Sensitivity is rapidly determined using visual modelling. The service is updated whenever major changes in remuneration are announced by the major life companies. A sample of some of the output screens is shown below. Many more views of commission payments made, non-commission services to adviser businesses, and payment terms can be accessed from the research. History is available to the early 2000's.

Full dynamic comparison of remuneration systems including business modelling & groups.

Quarterly Life and Health Insurance Sector Review

We also track industry news. We build a picture of the industry up from a review of news items for every major insurer, medical insurer, dealer group, bancassurer, industry association, and add to that specialist commentary on regulation, product, pricing, financial performance, and people. Current issues for the industry are considered in the light of the recent news. This is our most popular product, purchased by most industry participants, and includes a quarterly presentation to your senior team to allow for questions and context around the report.

Quarterly news, information, and commentary on the life and health insurance industry.

Quarterly Life and Health Sector Market Data

Product and advice process insights based on adviser quoting behaviour (in aggregate), preferred companies, product and price indices, and channel market share.

Product and advice process insights based on more than 150,000 quotes per month done on Quotemonster.

Data for Digital

Digital no-advice and digital advice services usually require data to help clients form a view about the products, options, and sums insured they wish to purchase. We provide both underlying insurance advice algorithms and supporting sum insured data to several companies offering digital services. 

Sum insured setting, product selection, online advice systems, and assistance with application for digital exemption.

Other data or market information available 

  • Client lapse and repurchase model

  • Adviser sales and revenue model

  • Regulatory changes tracking

  • Sales reference standards – all legal and regulatory requirements for personal insurance sales

  • Channel market share

  • Pace of change data - frequency of changes to policies and pricing for each 

  • Average basket of insurance sold

  • Numbers of members of groups and dealer groups

  • Market share of quoting

  • Pricing index

  • Market structure

  • Advice use cases