Moving into risk advice

On the risk side, will you be bringing on new advisers to fill the positions within the new business, or will you train up brokers to offer risk?

We are definitely looking to expand – we will be bringing on new advisers. Basically, where we are at the moment is I have brought on a young lady who has basically had zero experience in the industry. I did that on purpose because I didn’t want her to have any preconceived ideas of what the industry was and essentially to bring her from the ground up and learn all about the risk industry. So she is following me into all the meetings and, potentially, what she will be doing is she will be able to do all of our risk clients from beginning to end all via correspondence. So email and phone calls and once she is qualified and is approved to do so, she will be able to do the advice side as well.

From our side, we have a very efficient and streamlined business model where the client doesn’t even necessarily need to come in. We have a very brief fact find, where we email that to the client and when they hand that back in we send it off to the Philippines to look at the various options and the research with all the various insurance companies and then from there, we recommend the appropriate insurer for that particular client and then, again, send that to the Philippines to have the advice process written and then have that sent back on to the client.

With Suncorp deciding to walk away from managing their dealer groups, would you look to bring on any risk specialists from their network?

Yes and no – but more so no. The reason being is what I am trying to do is find individuals that have had no experience in the industry. I don’t necessarily want them to have experience; I want them to learn about the products and the features as they are today, and I don’t want them to be stuck in the way of saying this product has this benefit because product evolution is so constant. You need to have someone who is wanting to learn and take in all that information. If you get an adviser who has done it for four, five years, they just think they know everything and they don’t want to learn again.

Although, I am still open [to bringing them on] if they are young and keen to learn. But in March we will be looking to bring on another risk adviser.

With outsourcing your back-end processes to the Philippines, how much training and compliance checking do you have to do to make sure everything is compliant?

The client signs off saying that they’re happy for their personal information to go offshore from their side and then [we] explain to them that from the offshore side they can’t do screen shots or collect any of their personal data. It is only on their screen.

In terms of the actual agency that we use over there, they are approved by the licensee. So, the licensee did the due diligence on that and they are on their approved panel of outsource options available to us.

There are always concerns with those things, in terms of security risks, but our understanding and our belief is that they can’t collect any of that information other than physically writing it down with pen and paper. But my view of travelling overseas and seeing these agencies first hand is that these individuals that they employ are just so grateful to have a job they really don’t want to jeopardise it. So sure, there are concerns around security but at the end of the day they are happy to have a job and they don’t want to jeopardise that.

How will remuneration be structured within the business?

Level commission only – we don’t believe in ‘churn’. We don’t want to flog insurance products every couple of years to a client just because we get paid. We want to make sure they are in the right product for the long term. We are all about the client and do the best thing by the client and give them the best insurance policy that suits their needs for the long term.