Partners Life in renewed push of Evince online advice tool

Partners Life is making a renewed effort to persuade insurance advisers to start using its Evince online tool to aid the advice process.

Friday, May 19th 2023, 9:53AM

Managing director Naomi Ballantyne told GoodReturns her company is constantly upgrading the technology, which was launched in early 2019, and its most recent iteration has a number of enhanced features, many of which resulted from requests from users.

The renewed tool was displayed at recent roadshows Partners Life conducted.

“For people who haven’t used it before, it was an opportunity to look at it again and compare what they do to what Evince does,” Ballantyne said.

The uptake to date has been limited with “in the hundreds” of the 2,500 advisers Partners Life deals with currently using it.

“Change is hard for a lot of people,” and many advisers have preferred to stick with their existing processes, she said.

The roadshow has resulted in a surge of interest in the tool, which is free to advisers and which includes a number of “what if” features designed to show customers the impact of different decisions they might make and how much insurance cover they might need.

The internal advice team that deals with the policies Partners Life acquired with the BNZ Life purchase in September last year and with new customers BNZ refers – the sale included an exclusive 10-year agreement for BNZ to refer customers wanting life insurance to Partners Life – are using Evince.

The tool incorporates a range of information, such as property and rates data, and now has the information from 20,000 customers, which is particularly useful in calculating the average customer’s expenses, usually a tricky part of the process.

“It gives them a much more accurate total expenses without them having to enter every piece of it,” Ballantyne said.

“We’ve just kept refining it to it more and more useful for the customer” in a form that is easy for the customer to understand.

With ever-tightening regulation, Evince helps advisers to give more accurate and consistent advice.

“We have to be able to justify evey decision the system makes – the tool has really helped in knowing we were giving good advice and being able to show how that advice happened,” she said.

Partners Life established a separate company to own Evince and it cannot access any of the information adviser put into it.

Tags: Partners Life