Partners: No threat to advisers

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Direct insurance sales are no threat to the adviser force, Partners Life’s Naomi Ballantyne says.

Thursday, July 31st 2014, 6:00AM 5 Comments

Partners Life has reported a significantly oversubscribed capital raising and the accumulation of $100 million in in-force annual premiums.

“It is just over three years since we opened for business and, in a market dominated by well-resourced and long-established foreign-owned life companies, we have created a very substantial and competitive New Zealand company,” Ballantyne said.

The company generated $31.6 million in its capital raising, above a target of $20 million.

Partners Life deals only with advisers.

Ballantyne said the direct part of the market was tiny and advisers were needed to help New Zealanders get adequate levels of insurance.

“We have massive underinsurance. If we leave it to people to decide for themselves whether they need it and how much, it’s not going to be a good outcome for the consumer. “

She said the vast majority of people needed an adviser to explain to them what they needed and how to go about getting the products they needed.

It was a fallacy that people wanted to do things directly, she said. “It doesn’t take them long to realise that it’s more complex than they think. There’s hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even $1 million at stake. Trying to go that quickly without much thought, it doesn’t mix. It doesn’t take most people very long into the process to realise that they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

She said Partners was growing because it was focused on making its products the best answer for most clients. The company’s goal now was to drive efficiency as it continued to grow, she said. “To offer great products at a competitive price, efficiency is a huge part of that mix.”

Partners would also work on building the retention component of the business.  Ballantyne said the infrastructure had been built to deal with new business and the focus was now switching to how those clients were looked after when their circumstances changed.

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