Remember over 97 per cent of employers do not have group life, approximately 99 per cent do not have group income protection and 99.8 per cent have no critical illness and so advisers who introduce these benefits will, in the main be pushing at an open door.
Advisers have always had the pension data enabling them to quote these benefits but in the post-pensions commissions world this gift and the size of the opportunity will be the natural start point for the on-going employer discussions.
What an opportunity this data provides for the adviser has the ambition to use it proactively. Linking data sets will reduce administration time and so the focus will be on selling, rather than quoting and administering, while an ‘off the web’ approach to benefits reduces administration further as employers self-serve throughout the process.
While occupations limit the automated movement of data for things such as group income protection and group critical illness, moves are afoot, through the Interoperability Task Force, to ask for these as standard data sets.
Even group life schemes benefit from occupation data provision, but as a concession these have been dropped by us so we can use Real Time Information or pensions AE data to enable at least group life to be quoted on our Simply Class product.
Once occupations become a standard, collected area of data, more health-related benefits could be proactively quoted growing other areas of under-penetrated workplace benefits.
Some advisers are now proactively offering financial education for workplace programmes whether they be open sessions or 1:1 personal financial planning surgeries.
There are so many opportunities but do advisers have their strategies clear in their own minds?Fee-based high net worth personal financial planning morphing into corporate advice, as well as complex pension planning for niche areas, are already being offered and considered as a widespread fee based offering.
Offshore taxation planning support aligned with the niche of multinational pooling means that understanding what can be done for corporate clients on the pension and benefits side will produce its own niches.
With global mandates, the majority of multinational pooling is only undertaken by a few, larger advisers and yet the small amount of pools compared to the volume of multinational companies means that a proactive adviser that researches this specialism is playing in a green field site, untouched by most.
With some advisers getting funds under management as a business strategy, the blurring between the insurer/fund manager and adviser will get more blurred, albeit the long-term nature of revenue from small slithers of annual management charges will take some time to even begin to address the replacement of pensions revenues.
