Best Practice Guide - 8 Questions for insurance brokers to answer for HNW client

Hubbis

May 22, 2017

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Making the right broker selection is essential for HNW clients when choosing something so fundamentally important as life insurance. They therefore need to ensure they get the right information from their bankers – based on key questions – to create a transparent, rational path to identify the right solution.

Every HNW client in Asia – based on the guidance of their relationship manager (RM) – must ensure they are getting the right life insurance solution to meet their needs.

Brokers should be proactive, trained insurance experts with knowledge of a wide variety of policy options. They should therefore be able to point bankers in the right direction to advise their HNW clients, based on specific circumstances and financial needs. Further, value-added services allow a brokerage firm to differentiate from their competitors and create the opportunity for their clients to maximise their total spend.

Yet there are inevitably some brokers who do the minimum work required, but still get paid well, given existing commission structures. From a client’s perspective, making an educated selection – both in terms of the company itself as well as the specific policy – depends on being able to understand the reality of the situation. In short, this means knowing the salient facts.

So what are the difficult questions that a client should expect their RMs to be able to answer for them from a point of knowledge, rather than guess-work, after probing a broker?

For bankers, doing their due diligence in this way will enable them to provide much more value to their clients. RMs must be confident and have conviction that what they are putting in front of a client is relevant and suitable – and won’t cause any issues going forward.

Perhaps the best way of making the right decision should be based on the broker providing written responses to the questions, before proceeding to the next step?

This was part of the output from more than 35 in-depth, face-to-face interviews we recently conducted with many of Asia’s leading insurance brokers, carriers and distributors such as private banks and multi-family offices.
It formed the research for a separate White Paper focusing on how to evolve the market and broaden the types and volumes of insurance solutions (beyond Universal Life) that get traction and add real value to clients.