Are you getting the support you need?

I ask this question as there is a pertinent perspective from this with what we will need to be dealing with in the next couple of years. Unless you have been living under a rock, you’ll know regulation changes are coming; this isn’t about what that’s about.

Tuesday, September 25th 2018, 9:01AM

by Jon-Paul Hale

This is more the question of support, right now, today. What are you struggling with? What are you looking at and going, there must be a better/different/easier way to do this?

Part of this is we have many people in the industry for 10, 15, 20+ years and frankly after the first year, every other year was the same. They’re still doing it in the same way they did when they started.

Going forward this isn’t going to cut it, and more the point, it shouldn’t cut it now. So, I’m going to unpack a few things over the next little while to help you get started on the path you need to travel down.

I get it, for those that have turned up and done their thing without question until now, they’re going to find this next little while really challenging.

We have a couple of things on our plate right now, educating ourselves and refining/restructuring our businesses for what is coming. However, there is another thing that is more important, being around to have to comply with the new rules.

Which is where I’m going. Talking to a wide spectrum of advisers in many areas, and the regulation stuff is secondary to one core issue, how do I pay my bills today, and this is where many advisers are focused. Which is good, they’re helping people today and making sure they’re around to be regulated later.

However, a sentiment that has come through from many areas is trust, mostly the lack of it. Advisers siloing themselves off, partly to remove distractions, but also to remove and reduce the opportunity for hurt.

And I get that many advisers became advisers out of frustration from past lives, some it was a great sales job and others it was that, just a job until the real job they wanted came along, but it didn’t. Few advisers left school thinking I’ll be an insurance agent, most stumbled into it.

Add to this the continued deal-making and shady crap that has gone on along the way, yup you can be forgiven for wanting to distance yourself from all of this and just focus on your own pond.

We also have seen the effects of the market economy with advisers who started as agents for one company that stood up and protected them, are now finding themselves on the other side of the table from the insurer they felt was a partner. We have put our advisers through the wringer in many ways, as have other international markets and then they’ve blown the whistle and cried foul on the advisers.

We have many advisers out there doing a damn good job, sure they could tidy up in some areas, but on the whole, the real complaints haven’t been life insurance, though these have increased in recent times. If we look at the industry and the complaints made that result in advisers being penalised, the percentage is actually tiny.

While this may seem unfair, and feel like a sledgehammer for a walnut, the reality is we need to get people on the same page with the changes coming and ensure they can pay the bills to continue to do what they do. The Code Working Group will do their thing with the rules; however, this is unlikely to change the fact that education and business improvement needs to be tackled and lifted to at least a level that is expected from a current AFA.

So there’s the bar, next article I’ll talk about how you do this and run a business at the same time.

Tags: Jon-Paul Hale