Rebecca Sheils

The Association of Financial Advisers (AFA)’s Life Company of the Year is TAL Life.

TAL Life, which also took out the Service Quality Award and the Trauma Award for the TAL Life – Critical Illness Premier Plan, was awarded overall Platinum Winner of the AFA Life Company of the Year Awards (the Awards) for 2017 at an AFA event hosted at the Shangri-La Hotel in Sydney last night. BT Financial Group and MLC Insurance were runners up for the Platinum Award.

“We believe that recognising excellence is integral to building a strong profession, while driving improvements in product, service and value for money,” said AFA CEO Philip Kewin. “These Awards recognise excellence and innovation in the provision of insurance, investment, annuity products and services to advisers and clients.”

Categories for the Awards include the overall AFA Life Company of the Year Awards, offered in conjunction with Strategic Insight and the Client Service Team Awards, offered in conjunction  with the Beddoes Institute and Riskinfo.

Categories for the Awards include:

• Life Company of the Year
• Client Service Team Awards
• Platinum Award for Life Company of the Year
• Underwriting Team of the Year
• Life Insurance Product Category Awards
• Claims Team of the Year
• Annuity Provider of the Year
• Business Services/BDM Team of the Year
• Investment Bond of the Year
• Product Innovation Award
• Service Quality Award

“The overall Awards are based on independent quantitative research conducted by Strategic Insight, Actuaries and Researchers, resulting from three separate investigations during the year,” Mr Kewin said. “Five key areas are compared across the life companies and their products and in 2017, TAL Life ranked ahead of its peers.”

Zurich Financial Services took home the Term/TPD Award for its Death Cover, CommInsure won the Income Protection Award for its Income Care Platinum Plan and AMP Financial Services and MLC Insurance were joint winners of the Risk Product Innovation Award. In the Annuity and Income Stream Results category, Challenger won both the Overall Annuity Provider of the Year and the Long Term Income Stream Award, while the Annuity & Income Stream Innovation Award went to CommInsure Retire Smarter. CommInsure also won the Investment Bond Results Award.

Rael Solomon, Regional Managing Director, Strategic Insight, which supports the overall Life Company of the Year awards said, “Latest market share data shows overall life insurance risk market inflows up only 2.5% over the year. However, some life companies have shown far stronger growth than the market average. The Awards reveal where life companies have found competitive advantage and success in the individual risk market over the last year and an early indication of how advisers are beginning to adjust their support for the different companies, during the implementation stages of the Life Insurance Framework.”

In the Client Service Team Awards, BT Financial Group won the Underwriting Award, OnePath took home the Claims Award and ClearView was awarded the BDM/Business Support Award.

Dr Rebecca Sheils, Director of the Beddoes Institute, which supports the Client Service Team Awards said, “The Client Service Team Awards are based on just under 2,000 ratings from advisers across all major life insurance companies. It is therefore the collective opinion of a large number of advisers that has determined which companies have excelled in service in 2017. We firmly believe these Awards and the Beddoes Adviser Experience Benchmarking Study that underpins them are helping life insurance companies to lift their level of service and expertise in order to deliver a better outcome and a better experience for both advisers and their clients.”

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Advisers must tailor their advice to the different generations.

Financial advisers must tailor their communication strategies to suit the needs of each individual generation.

This is the central finding of Connecting with Clients, a white paper released today by the Association of Financial Advisers (AFA) with the support of Zurich, based on research conducted by the Beddoes Institute.

AFA CEO, Brad Fox said advisers who communicate in line with their client’s preferred communication channels achieve higher client satisfaction levels, have stronger client relationships and have clients who are more likely to refer the adviser’s business to family and friends.

“Our key finding is that not all forms of communication are created equal,” Mr Fox said. “There are different preferences between different generations of clients and there are tangible performance outcomes for advice practices that get the mix right.”

Mr Fox said that as the advice arena moves into the digital age, there is a growing preference for digital forms of communication, particularly in the one-to-many space. “This helps the advice practice keep a more frequent relationship with clients, and we know from the paper that this is one of the keys to client satisfaction.”

Anther important finding is that personal emails are the preferred method of one-on-one communication for all generations. “That said, baby boomers like it less than the younger generations and Gen Y prefer it a little less than Gen X,” Mr Fox said.

All the generations also want to meet with their advisers face-to-face, however while Gen Y prefer catch-ups – for example over coffee – to more formal meetings at the adviser’s office, baby boomers want more formality.

“A baby boomer’s preference for informal catch‐ups, or even for formal meetings in their own home or workplace, is very low compared to other generations,” Mr Fox said.

The Beddoes Institute’s Dr Rebecca Sheils said the results suggest that a ‘more is more’ effect is consistent across ages, with clients in all three generations reporting higher satisfaction with practices that communicate via a larger number of channels.

“All generations want personal email communication to varying degrees but they also want their advisers to connect with them in other ways, including face-to-face,” she said.

Richard Dunkerley, Zurich’s Head of Marketing and co-author of the paper said the findings around social media usage closely mirrored figures previously released by Zurich showing exponential growth in the use of social platforms by advisers.

“The findings also make it clear that there is an increasing preference for people to access content through their mobile device,” he said, “and to the extent that apps help improve the user experience, we expect the development of adviser specific apps to be a massive growth area.”

Connecting with Clients reports on the communication preferences of a total of 530 clients of leading financial advice practices who participated in the Client Experience Survey (the Survey). The Survey is part of The Beddoes Institute’s Leading Practices Program, conducted in August 2013 on behalf of the 10 short‐listed advisers from the 2013 AFA Adviser of the Year Award.  A comprehensive list of 20 different communication methods currently used by financial advisers in their businesses was used in the Survey.

To optimize the value from this white paper to financial advisers, we have developed an online resource centre to help advisers put the findings of the white paper into practice. Among other things, it will provide updates, case studies, video interviews and an online course.

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