Improving Your Brand Could Help in Washington: Finseca CEO
One possible beneficiary: Efforts to keep the federal government from taxing life insurance.
Better branding could help the people now known as life insurance agents serve more clients, and it could also help keep Congress from finding ways to tax life insurance, according to Marc Cadin, Finseca’s CEO.
Cadin talked about the link between branding and federal tax policy Friday, in an interview.
Finseca is the group that was formed from the combination of GAMA International and AALU. AALU was famous for efforts to explain and shape federal life insurance and estate planning policy.
Finseca is now working to buffer life insurance and annuities against efforts by Democrats in Congress to find revenue sources they can use to pay for new benefits and programs, such as adding dental benefits to the traditional Medicare program.
Trusts
Cadin said one Finseca priority is protecting the status of the life insurance used in connection with grantor trusts — an asset transfer tool that has been popular with estate planners and their clients.
The United States has avoided imposing income taxes on life insurance. For the life and annuity community, the key problem with many of the new trust rule change proposals is that they would pull the life insurance that has been in the trust back into the taxable estate, Cadin said.
“We’re going to keep working on it till we get this fixed,” Cadin said.
The Strategy
Finseca is talking to both to Republicans and Democrats, but, because of the partisan nature of the current infrastructure and social welfare spending bill talks, the group has been focusing on the Democrats, Cadin said.
“We’re having the right conversations with the right congressional members and the right congressional staff,” he added.
In the past, some big spending bill fights have led to flurries of competing drafts showing up on the web.
This time around, “we have not seen lots of drafts floating around,” Cadin said.
Branding
Cadin said the recent publication of a list of 250 top financial security professionals in Forbes is the kind of thing that can help the industry in Washington.
Instead of news organizations referring to people who sell life insurance as agents or brokers, “I’d like you to start referring to them as financial security professionals,” he said.
Elevating awareness of financial professionals’ role in helping clients create financial security can help those professionals make their voices heard in Washington, he said.
Marc Cadin (Photo: Finseca)