I spent a delightful day in Dublin on Thursday courtesy of Friends First, Ireland’s sixth largest insurance firm, who ran a Broker Symposium – The Future for Financial Advice.
They had invited me to talk about the change management process that firms like ours have been through ahead of the Retail Distribution Review (RDR) which was implemented on 31st December 2012.
The Irish pensions, investment and protection markets do not currently have their version of RDR but the regulator, the Central Bank of Ireland, certainly recognises the need for change.
Ireland of course has its own economic issues to deal with; so change for our fellow intermediaries in that jurisdiction should be seen with a backdrop of a challenging economic environment.
However they do seem to have some of the problems in Ireland that the UK IFA would recognise. There is not much new business around but a lot of ‘switch’ business masquerading as new business.
There are commercial incentives in the form of commissions that encourage advisers to recommend that a client gives up one product in return for another.
At its worst this might carry that label “churning” and the CBI are well aware of the drivers of this activity.
Some forward thinking organisations like Friends First have not only recognised this problem and sought to contain it by removing “volume overrides” on their commission payments but are encouraging advisers to think ahead by embracing change now, ahead of it being forced upon them.
My role at the Symposium was to describe the way the RDR has changed the shape of the UK intermediary market but more importantly deliver a call to action about the need to embrace change for good sound business reasons and not to wait until change is forced upon you.
Everything we have learned is that change you decide to make for yourself is more likely to succeed than change that a regulator forces upon you.
There was some great participation from all the speakers from the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands, as well as some great questions from the audience.
Photo credit: Flickr/Trent Strohm
