The world in your hands

This would mean that once an IFA had learnt to use these facilities on one provider’s website they would automatically know how to execute the same transaction on any other provider’s extranet.

Industry wide co operation

In a significant development a number of leading national IFAs have recently approached life offices, following the pattern that successfully created the Industry New Business E-Commerce (NBEC) project, to ask for industry wide co operation in order to create a common look and feel to valuation and projection services via IFA extranets.

Although the ability to provide such information electronically or otherwise, is certainly an important competitive issue in terms of the level of service to IFAs, once a provider has taken the decision to deliver such services it is essential that this is done in a way that enables advisers to start using such services quickly and easily.

This is not achieved if every time a life office launches a new extranet the IFAs have to learn a different way to use the key transactional services. Support for this national IFA initiative will undoubtedly lead to a far greater use of extranets, ultimately resulting in greater savings for the life offices through wider use of these low cost services.

So far extranets for IFAs have been restricted to the world wide web, it is however important to remember that this is just the Model-T Ford of communications technology. Third generation mobile phones, digital television and high power hand held devices will all need to be accommodated as delivery platforms for these services in the next few years.

One thing is for sure, IFAs can look forward to more services where, when and how they want them in the future. And this will be essential for any product providers that want to maintain their competitive position.