Advisers with low numbers of life insurers on their licensee Approved Product Lists (APL) are more likely to go outside that list, most likely in an effort to meet the best interest of clients, according to an adviser sentiment reported conducted by Adviser Ratings.
The 2016 Adviser Sentiments Life Insurance Report, based on a online survey of 1,017 advisers from more than 25 advice groups late in 2016, found bank-owned licensees typically had the half the insurance coverage of non-bank owned licensees at 4.14 insurers compared to 8.57 insurers.
While this was not surprising, Adviser Ratings Managing Director, Angus Woods said the willingness of advisers to break ranks to source a policy outside their licensee’s APL was an unexpected finding of the survey.
“the willingness of advisers to break ranks to source a policy outside their licensee’s APL was an unexpected finding”
Woods said the general trend in the survey was that the lower the number of insurers on an advisers’ APL the more likely they are to recommend products not on their APL.
This trend was not restricted to non-institutionally aligned advice groups with the survey finding advisers from AMP, ANZ, CBA and Westpac aligned advice groups regularly going outside their licensee’s APL, according to Woods.
The report also included adviser opinions on which life insurers best handled claims, following ASIC’s recent report into the issue which did not list specific insurers.
Adviser Ratings stated that Asteron Life, AIA Australia and TAL were considered the top three insurers for overall claims handling as well as for TPD, and Trauma claims handling by survey respondents. Asteron Life, TAL and One Path were rated the highest for income protection claims handling.
Direct life insurers received little support with more than half of advisers rating the claims handling experience and approval rates of direct life insurers as poor and placing them last out of the 15 insurers in the survey.
