With Partners Life having completed its acquisition of BNZ Life, financial advisers might wonder what will change for their clients who have a policy from the bank.
“Not a lot,” says Partners Life in a note sent to the adviser community.
However, Partners Life says former BNZ Life policy holders with LifeCare products have had retrospective upgrades applied to their policies to bring them into line with those of equivalent Partners Life benefits.
“For all intents and purposes those policies will remain in-force on existing systems, just with the cover being provided by Partners Life instead of BNZ Life,” says the insurer.
“Bancassurance clients are better served receiving advice than staying put with no advice – and we also know that up until today, we have been the beneficiary of many advisers moving bancassurance policies – including BNZ Life – to Partners Life.”
Because ex-BNZ Life policies are now insured by Partners Life, but administered on different systems, the firm has a custom process to move bancassurance benefits to its Sonata system.
Partners Life says that by allowing migrations, advisers could keep any existing life cover sums insured held by the client on their existing premium rates, and top-up with additional life cover through Partners Life – to access some of the additional benefits (for example the repatriation benefit).
“Additionally, if the client’s health has changed since they first took out covers with BNZ Life, you may decide to keep the covers that client has on their current terms, to limit the covers or level of covers (subject to new underwriting terms),” says Partners Life.
“By allowing for full migration of LifeCare products and clients, we believe we have created a process which allows you the maximum flexibility to provide a great outcome to these clients, while meeting your advice regulation requirements and providing efficiency by enabling all benefits to be held under one policy.”
As for remuneration, Partners Life says as former BNZ Life policies are administered by Partners Life, any migrated existing benefits would not attract renewal commission under the Sonata policy because they are priced assuming no commission payable.
However, any Partners Life covers included in the new Partners Protection Plan would have all the normal commission options available, and commission will be payable as normal.