Some Life Insurance Producers Might Need Planners: Survey
Agent and producer enthusiasm for planning tools is soft.
Financial advisors could find pockets of demand for their services at life insurance agencies.
About 14% of independent life insurance producers surveyed said their agencies hire outside firms to provide financial planning and wealth management services for the clients, according to a life producer survey conducted by LIMRA and the National Association of Independent Life Brokerage Agencies.
LIMRA and NAILBA
LIMRA is a nonprofit financial services research organization with roots in the life and annuity markets.
NAILBA is a group for independent life insurance distributors. It recently combined with another financial services organization, Finseca, and describes itself as a Finseca community.
The Survey
LIMRA and NAILBA conducted one survey of about 70 independent life distributors.
The groups also conducted a survey of 238 life producers who work with independent life distributors.
The producer survey participants included 180 financial professionals classified as agents or brokers and 58 as independent financial advisors who place some life and annuity business through independent distributors.
Life Producers and Planning
The participating producers reported that about 6% of their business comes from investment product sales.
About 53% offer clients financial planning and wealth management services, and 39% provide those services themselves.
Life producers were cool toward distributors’ financial planning tools.
About 79% of the producers said they get financial planning software from their distributors. Only 26% are very satisfied with the software.
That compares with a “very satisfied” rate of 61% for the distributors’ advanced sales support services.
Product Predictions
Most life producers surveyed predicted that sales of each major type of individual life insurance product will grow or stay the same over the next three years.
Many were optimistic about annuity sales, but the percentage who said sales will fall was 25% or higher for fee-based variable annuities, ordinary variable annuities and fee-based, non-variable indexed annuities.
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