Principality building society has signed multi-tie agreements with five life offices to provide its protection propositions.
The Welsh building society has established a pure protection multi-tie agreement with AXA, Friends Provident, Norwich Union, Standard Life and Zurich.
The five insurers will provide both level and decreasing term assurance, whole of life cover, income protection (IP) and critical illness (CI) insurance.
The five pure protection providers are part of a larger panel of eight firms who will also offer a financial planning multi-tie and a protection multi-tie for Principality's mortgage broking arm, Peter Alan Estate Agents.
Although five of the eight firms are on all three multi-tie panels, other providers have varying degrees of involvement.
Skandia and Scottish Equitable Protect will offer level term assurance and CI, while Scottish Provident will provide CI and IP, but only on the financial planning and mortgage broking multi-ties.
"The situation with Scottish Provident came about because of delays in the negotiations.
At that time of the deal, they did not have their account managers in place so we did not include them on the pure protection multi-tie," said Neil Pritchard, head of group financial services at Principality.
In October 2004, the building society invited 12 providers to take part in an online auction for its multi-tie business.
Besides the eight companies that were finally accepted as partners, Liverpool Victoria and Legal & General turned down the opportunity to participate in the auction while BUPA and Bright Grey's attempts to secure a multi-tie agreement were turned down.
"We are the first building society of our size to opt for a multi-tie model and we selected providers against the strength of their product and the quality of their service, processing and pricing," added Pritchard.
The financial planning multitie will be launched on 1 August 2005 with both the pure protection and mortgage broking protection panels set to follow on 1 November 2005.
