Brad Fox

The Association of Financial Advisers (AFA) and Plan for Life (PFL) have named TAL as the 2014 Life Company of the Year at a black-tie premier event held at the Westin Hotel in Sydney last night.

As well as receiving the overall Platinum Award, TAL also won the Trauma award and was a finalist in the award categories of Service Quality and Term/TPD.

AFA CEO Brad Fox said TAL was well deserving of the platinum award. “The Platinum Award recognises the insurer that has shown exceptional performance across all judging criteria including an important element that reflects upon the sustainability of their product and services. TAL has certainly led the market in a number of areas over recent years including initiatives that bring efficiency gains to advisers and their businesses as well as to the client.”

CommInsure and BT Financial Group were runners up for the Platinum Award.

Rael Solomon, Manager Marketing and Product Development at PFL said, “We compared five key areas, including financial strength of the company, product feature strength, company service quality, premium rates and company market strength to determine the winners in all categories. These in conjunction with consistency of premium rates and product features, product improvements and unique product features, lapse data, contribution to the growth and promotion of the Australian life insurance industry, internal service benchmarks and sustainability were considered in the process.”

Challenger was awarded all three Annuity and Income Stream Awards, including Overall Annuity Provider, Long Terms Income Stream and the Annuity and Income Stream innovation award.

Macquarie Life also won all three client service team awards as reflected in adviser feedback collected and analysed by the Beddoes Institute in conjunction with RiskInfo; Underwriting Team of the Year, Claims Team of the Year and BDM Team of the Year.

The assessment for the Life Company of the Year Awards is completed in two parts. The Product Awards are based on data provided by participating companies to PFL on a quarterly basis, combined with service quality input. The Service Team Awards are the result of around 2,000 survey responses from financial advisers which are then analysed by the Beddoes Institute.

Commenting generally on the importance of the awards, Mr Fox noted that the tripartite relationship between insurer, adviser and client is important for Australian societal outcomes. “The research into Australians that receive help from a financial adviser to organise their life insurance show clearly that they have far better protection in the event of death or health disaster. Advised clients have more than three times the death cover of non-advised Australians, and they have insurance contracts with far better terms and conditions – the evidence of the quality shows up at claim time when it really matters. Advised life insurance continues to deliver far better outcomes than direct insurance.”

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