Life offices must improve how they support general financial advisers. Plan Money's Pete Chadborn explains the issues to Fiona Murphy
What the consumer does care about is engaging with the brand and whether it will be a quick and relatively painless transaction, Chadborn says.
He adds: “When I first heard the name ‘Beagle Street’ I thought, ‘Who’s going to buy something from someone called that?’ Now consumer buying habits are changing.
"The younger generations might not trust the legacy providers and the dusty old life offices, and like the style of new providers such as Beagle Street. They give the impression it’s relatively straightforward, I’ve not got to jump through hoops, sit down with an adviser, I’ll go online and look at that. I think some of the big life offices will still trade on brand: the likes of Aviva with its advertising, which is really good, but some of the others will lose their way.”
Switching off consumers
The major issue is not only life offices risking consumers switching off. Chadborn repeats his earlier point about such firms losing intermediary relationships.
Going back to the idea of life offices unwittingly and wittingly detaching from intermediaries, Chadborn points to some trends in the market.
He explains: “A lot of life offices are unwittingly engaging with intermediaries unless they do a certain level of business with them. The ultimate test would be if you were to sit down with an IFA and ask ‘who is your account manager?’, I bet more intermediaries of models and businesses of our size would say, ‘With most of those we don’t have a broker consultant, we deal with a team. Of those where we do have a consultant, I might be able to name a few of those.’ It would be like you sitting with my clients and them not knowing the name of their IFA. I don’t have engagement there, do I?”
Chadborn says this is more common than you would think, and he would like to have a more personalised relationship with some of these players.
Life offices must engage in a more productive way with ‘holistic’ financial planners or risk the issues that Chadborn has identified at the coalface. But will the industry listen?
