moneyblog

Conversation or mudslinging?

A little while ago Jenée Tibsharaeny talked with me about trying to engage readers in the conversation. I like that. I also know that most of the financial journalists are keen to engage. If you have a story to tell, I encourage you to call and discuss and engage with media people, as they hope to engages readers. My experience is that Philip Macalister, Susan Edmunds, Peter Sobels, Maya Breen, Diana Clements, Jenée Tibsharaeny, and David Chaplin have all been very interested in learning more about the industry and engaging positively.

On the other hand, you get examples of people who only want to sling mud. In the comments on my recent article about insurance fraud I had one person lay all the blame at the feet of the industry. To them, the industry is 'corrupt to the bone', and the FMA is 'captured' and dispute resolution schemes are all being 'defrauded' by insurers. In short, everyone is wrong - except them. It must be a lonely, scary world. We all know that in a large industry, there are problems. But to defame everyone, with no sense of proportion, or balance, or interest in solutions, It's a shame.

What interests you in 2019?

A quick note to ask you what subjects are going to interest you most in 2019. Obviously, some make the list automatically - like our long list of conduct and compliance issues - but I am particularly interested in other areas. Maybe operations? Academic research? Training and professional development? Channel prospects? Do drop me an email and I will do my best to dig up some good new sources of information and drop them into your planning processes in January. 

Navigating Regulation Advice Summit 2019

The FMA, MBIE and the FSC are hosting the 'Navigating Regulation Advice Summit' on the 13th of March in Wellington and on the 14th of March 2019 in Auckland. The following week it will be held in Christchurch on the 19th of March and in Dunedin on the 20th of March.

Click here to register and to find out more. 

Cigna Welcomes OnePath Leaders Onboard

Cigna's CEO Gail Costa says “We had a great first week and everyone has come together really well. It is a very exciting time for us.” Since their acquisition of OnePath in October Cigna's team has almost doubled in size and places them as the third largest life insurer in the country. Click here to read more. 

MBIE publishes discussion paper on licensing fees and levies

Commerce and Consumer Affairs Minister Kris Faafoi has today released a Discussion paper seeking feedback on regulations to support the Financial Services Legislation Amendment Bill. The Discussion paper seeks feedback on proposed:

• licensing fees that prospective financial advice providers will be required to pay when applying for a licence from the Financial Markets Authority
• changes to the Financial Markets Authority levy that those giving financial advice will be required to pay
• changes to the calculation of the FMA levy that applies to authorised bodies

A copy of the Discussion paper can be viewed here.

Submissions on the Discussion paper are due by 5pm on Friday 22 February 2019. We welcome your feedback on the proposed fees and levies. Please use the submissions template available at the above link.

Towards Prosperity Research Launch

It was great to see the FSC launch the Towards Prosperity research on Thursday night. Some results might surprise those with a solidly agrarian view of the New Zealand economy:

• Financial services is a large part of our economy – in fact larger than the average for the OECD 28.
• Our contribution isn’t limited to the larger cities, with growth shared throughout the regions as well.

There is lots more to discover, in a pack which is a great grounding for more specific work that you may do for clients, channel managers, or advisers. You can download your copy here: Download Toward Prosperity - Financial Services Council - Research into the Financial Services Sector December 2018

Planning series: sources of capital

Whether you are large or small, starting a new initiative implies risk. Sure, you can draw a slug of capital down, and allocate it to a project. There are problems with that. Some perfectly good projects die for lack of capital, some die from having too much - without scarcity, there is often a lack of focus. So this post is about alternative sources of capital, the kind you can draw on to build new things from idea to the point you have enough data to build a proper business case, and get the capital you really need.

• Time - yours, and the time of another who also wants in on the new idea. Collaboration brings leverage, a solid critique of yours ideas, and perspective - provided you are collaborating with some one who perceives themselves as your equal, who won't be too scared to share their ideas, and is not a clone of you. Working with others, while annoying at times, also means your idea has to pass its first crucial test: will someone else believe in it? The key is to pinch a bit of time - a regular patch of time, and make yourself accountable to someone to keep that time for your new project. Staff are often seconded for a period at no cost - you just have to have a good pitch.
• Business partners - Advisers might best think in terms referral sources, other advisers, dealer groups, or adjacent disciplines in financial services. Somewhere, the solution you are developing will provide benefits to someone who is not in your business. Call them, set up an appointment in January or February, and then you will have taken an important first step.
• Capital in kind - people are sometimes more prepared to extend services to a new project than they are to deploy cash. Share your idea, then negotiate a free period for the service you need while you get set up. To be fair to all concerned, put a sunset date on the arrangement, to spare embarrassment if things stretch out.
• Build once: tack your requirements on to the build process for another project. Often this will be seen as an added benefit, with small marginal cost. People like options. So thinking ahead, especially with IT requirements, can help you to pinch a little resource where needed.
• Clients - some of your clients will be delighted to help out. Typically, they like to be invited to qualitative sessions to discuss new ideas, or to join closed groups to test alpha versions of services, or even just look over wordings and graphics at the end of a meeting with you.

But remember, don't be dick and abuse the privilege. Belief may overcome accounting for a while, but only a short while. The consequences for asking for too much can be a sharply worded email, or a consumer revolt. Sooner or later, everyone has to get paid. If your project isn't viable without a lot of free stuff, then it isn't viable.

Partners Life posts interim results

Goodreturns has this article (with a decent table of data, so I won't reproduce it here) on the results from Partners Life for the six months to 30 September 2018. Link.

Planning series: what will you stop doing?

Before you can do more, you must do less. Yesterday you were alive for 24 hours. You did something with the time. Most of the people I know don't have loads of free time. Even if you spent a lot less time working yesterday than you could have, if you are planning a big change... you need to take into a account what you will do less of. If it was leisure, then how will you adjust? If you are going to change what you work on, within your typical working week, how will you do that? There are three main strategies: ditch, delegate, and digitise.

• Ditch unproductive tasks, or those tasks that don't align with your new plans.
• Delegate tasks where you can, choosing to train, trust, and manage others to achieve goals in your business usually creates growth for you and for them.
• Digitising tasks to create more efficiency, freeing up time to do new things, is a worthwhile ambition. It can get complicated, you may need help.

But once you have worked to free up a significant chunk of your diary, then there is real space for new things to grow, and new goals to be achieved. Without first creating the space, they will remain just a pipe-dream.

nib Children's Cover

nib is highlighting that cover can be put in place just for children (without the need for adult lives to be insured). There are also two current promotions which you can read more about here.

Ultimate Health Max and Ultimate Health
One child free for 12 months for each adult insured under the policy.

Easy Health
Clients get a 20% discount on Easy Health cover for the duration of the policy, plus a reduced wait period on pre-existing conditions down from three to two years.

FSC Event, Navigating Regulation

The FSC is hosting a new Navigating Regulation Event in March 2019. Well worth attending, from Chatswood Kelly Pulham and I will attend. Click here for details.

Latest Goodreturns Article - insurance fraud

My latest piece on goodreturns is at this link. This time the subject is insurance fraud - and whether or not to keep quiet about it.

New Quotemonster Interface

Quotemonster has had a makeover which went live earlier last week after a month of beta testing by a number of advisers. Many changes have been made to maximise the use of space on the website to create a cleaner looking and better functioning Quotemonster. Changes include:

• Adding clients and benefits horizontally rather than vertically meaning less scrolling and easier viewing (as pictured below)
• Head to head now has policy wording links to items
• For Advicemonster users needs analysis now includes Mortgage Cover and shows Income Protection and Mortgage Cover as split benefits. There is also a new settings section for needs analysis allowing you to set your our defaults for cover calculations
• Better display and functionality on mobile and tablet devices

If you have Quotemonster saved as a bookmark in your browser you will need to update this. Click on this link to open the new Quotemonster and save this as your new bookmark.

If you have any feedback about the new site we would love to hear it - please email info@quotemonster.co.nz. Happy crunching!

 

 

CIGNA appoints Jax Mitchell as new Head of Distribution

Gail Costa, CEO CIGNA, has announced the appointment of Jax Mitchell as Head of Distribution, a role which includes the newly acquired OnePath Life business.

AIA /Sovereign staff help give foster children a happy Christmas

Press release from AIA/Sovereign - 6 December 2018.

A charity that provides practical support to foster children to assist their transition to new homes has another 150-plus new toys to provide this Christmas, thanks to the generosity of the staff at AIA and Sovereign.

The toys were handed over at the AIA /Sovereign offices this morning.

"AIA and Sovereign have been amazing collecting and wrapping all these Christmas gifts alongside social workers who know what their children will love. We really appreciate your support and would love other local businesses to follow your lead. Thank you for helping us for another year,” says Louise Allnutt, Auckland Co-ordinator and Chairperson of Foster Hope.

“Sadly, Christmas is a stressful time of the year, where child protection agencies around the country see a big increase in child abuse and crisis management cases.”

“We want to ensure that if a child is suddenly placed in a new home at this time, that the foster family is not caught short with nothing under the tree for this child,” Louise Allnutt says.

Chief Executive Officer AIA New Zealand, Nick Stanhope, says a sporting theme was chosen for the gift drive, in line with the company’s ambitions for New Zealand, and New Zealanders. 

“We want all Kiwi kids to think about health and wellness early in their lives, so that they form the sort of habits that will help them live healthier, longer, better lives.”

“I’m really struck by the generosity of our combined AIA and Sovereign team, which the companies are backing up with a $2000 donation.

“I’d implore anyone else who wants to help foster children get the best start in life to either donate a toy before December 10, or to make a cash donation,” Nick Stanhope says. 

Foster Hope’s gift donation guidelines, and the details on how to make cash donations, are on their website.

“Lastly, I hope that all Kiwi children – whether they be in foster care or not – as well as our customers and partners, have a happy holiday, and a positive start to the New Year,” Nick Stanhope says. 

A scene from the handover of the gifts this morning (6 December 2018).

 

Planning series: women shun financial advisers in favour of money advice from robots - why?

When you are planning the year ahead, keeping an eye on new trends may provide you with insights. At first, I thought I would write about advice automation when I read this article from the Sydney Morning Herald, but then I realised there may be a different angle. The article states that women are more likely to invest through robo-advisers than men.

'Six Park reveals that accounts held solely by women have more than doubled in recent months to sit at 40 per cent, up from 20 per cent in January. The firm delivers financial advice online using algorithms and technology in place of a human financial adviser.' Click here to read more. 

It is fascinating, it felt to me that the issues of convenience would apply equally to men as to women - so there must be some other reason why women seem to take up robo-advice offers more than men. Maybe it is a reflection of the old-school, male dominated industry image. Of course, I might be wrong, this is probably insufficient data, but perhaps there is a business case for diversity. Which brings us back to planning. You might be able to figure this out on your own, but maybe you need some fresh perspectives. Bear in mind, if your next hire is just like all the other people you have ever hired, they aren't likely to take you to new places.

You might also like this article.

How To Survive Office Christmas Parties As An Introvert

Lifehacker has this infographic titled 'How To Survive Office Christmas Parties As An Introvert'

Planning series: do all advisers have to sound the same?

According to a new study from BNY Mellon's Pershing the survey finds most advisors fail to convey a unique value proposition. This is not unique to the investment world, and is a trend that could worsen as advisers, concerned about compliance, tend to try to be in the mainstream. Innovation, it seems, has a bad name.

But does it have to be that way?

I know that many financial advisers, not being IT experts, go to service providers to set up their websites - and those companies often employ template-based approaches. Advisers concerned to allow their sites to be found by search engines tend to prefer using standard or widely accepted names for different services. The challenge is, you lose your differentiation. All you do is prove that you are 'just like all the rest'.

Sure, your SOA must address the six step process, but most advisers I know are not short of personality. It isn't a bad thing, you don't need to hide it. Showing who you are, and that includes what annoys you and what you like to celebrate in life, helps your clients to relate to you. That is at a personal level. Now translate that to your business. With a little more scale your business can have a broader personality, or reputation. If you are in a diverse market, and hire for diversity, then you can serve more segments in that market. 

It is worth trying to break out of the boring old sameness, and it isn't hard, just be you.

Click here to read more. 

 

Does social media actually work for financial advisers?

Tony Vidler has this excellent video on the answer to the question. Link. You have to be better at promoting what you do than doing what you do. You can argue with that all you like, but if you never want to do any marketing, you'd probably better just get a job in someone else's business. I guess the thing I like about this social media comment from Tony is the strong link to marketing automation at the end - how you turn those 'suspects' or 'tyre-kickers' online into real prospects, and better yet, how you automate the first few stages of that process so you can do that much more efficiently, saving your precious fact-to-face time for clients.

TPD Claim - it takes time, but its worth it

Anand Srinivasan provides us with some more detail on the recent article we recently wrote here.

It took me over 15 months to get this claim paid out from an initial decline, the key reason for success was every party played the role.

If someone thinks TPD will be paid out after 90 days wait they are sadly mistaken. 90 days is the wait period for being eligible to lodge a claim. Getting TPD out it is a different set of requirements and I feel very lucky to have experienced this journey so early in my career as an adviser.

My client went through the umpteen tests cross questioning and verification. It was not easy but same time it was not difficult because I knew there was light at end of tunnel. The one thing I learnt from this journey was the value an adviser brings to the table at claim time.

Insurer looks at adviser for right information and evidence. Client looks at adviser to give confidence that claim will be paid at some stage if they follow they comply. The reinsurer have to come to party so everything needs to stack up.

While as an adviser I was managing the insurance company expectation, my client Darrell managed the Doctors, Specialist, Occupation Physician, ACC assessor etc. No one person can claim credit  for getting a TPD payout everyone has to give their 100%.

A great outcome indeed which cements my faith that I will continue to be an adviser for a long time because it works.

I have another adviser who has been in touch saying that a client feels that the requirements to prove their TPD claim are too hard, and the insurer is deliberately trying to discourage them - and perhaps has no intention of paying the claim. I don't think that's true for most claims - but in fairness to other policy holders they have to be careful before they hand out claims payments. The case above was for more than $600,000.