The insurance advisors surveyed for this year’s Insurance Advisors’ Report Card said their firms continue to fall short in delivering the technology and tech support advisors need. In particular, when tools and systems don’t work well, that impedes advisors’ ability to build their business and serve clients to the fullest.
“I need several systems to work,” says an advisor on the Prairies with Winnipeg-based Great-West Life Assurance Co.’s (GWL) Gold Key distribution network. “If they don’t, it puts a huge burden on me.”
When advisors were asked to rate their firms’ performance in the “technology tools and advisor desktop” category, the insurance agencies received an overall average performance rating of 7.9. However, when compared with the overall average importance rating of 8.9 that advisors gave the tech category, the resulting “satisfaction gap” of 1.0 was tied with “client account statements” for the second-highest gap in the survey.
Advisors’ tech gripes are nothing new. They include: outdated advisor desktop or tools; substandard software applications for financial planning; inadequate training or support; and weak contact management systems (CMS).
“From Day 1, [the CMS tool] has been difficult to use and cumbersome,” says an advisor on the Prairies with London, Ont.-based Freedom 55 Financial.
Freedom 55 advisors gave their firm the lowest performance rating in the “adequacy of your firm’s/MGA’s contact management systems,” at 5.8, down from 6.6 in 2014. However, Freedom 55 advisors also gave their firm a much better rating in “support for developing a financial plan for clients,” mainly as a result of a recent upgrade to the NaviPlan financial planning software.
Freedom 55 has been taking steps to address its technology issues. These include the recent NaviPlan update; a recent redesign of its consumer website; the introduction of a “bring your own PC” regime to give advisors greater flexibility in the hardware they use; and the decision to switch from the firm’s current CMS tool to San Francisco-based Salesforce.com Inc.’s popular cloud-based system next year.
“We think this is something that’s going to be well embraced by our field,” says Mike Cunneen, senior vice president of Freedom 55’s wealth and estate planning group. “It’s something [advisors] have been asking for.”
GWL advisors were even more dissatisfied with their firm’s tech tools, rating the firm at 5.7 in the category, the lowest among all the firms in the survey. In particular, advisors said, GWL’s technology is outdated and the firm provides little tech support.
“We don’t have a system that’s intuitive or well understood,” says a GWL advisor in Quebec. “The technology department is almost nonexistent.”
Although GWL allows its advisors to choose their own desktop technology and CMS, the firm does provide web-based tech tools for wealth management and offers a discounted price on financial planning software. GWL is focusing on building its advisor website, through which advisors can get information, access to tools and execute trades.
“We need to invest at a higher rate than we did previously, and we’re doing that,” says Hugh Moncrieff, senior vice president of GWL’s Gold Key distribution network. “One of the things in scope is the complete overhaul of our advisor website so that the experience [that] advisors and staff have with us is more seamless, less complicated, [provides] easier access and has much more robust and enriched content.”
Although the overall sentiment on tech tools was negative, some advisors praised their firms for putting solid platforms in place. That was the case among advisors with Mississauga, Ont.-based IDC Worldsource Insurance Network Inc. (IDC WIN), who gave their managing general agency (MGA) the highest performance ratings in the tech tools, adequacy of CMS and support for developing a financial planning categories.
“[The MGA] gets us all the systems we need and more,” says an IDC WIN advisor in Ontario. “They really go the extra mile.”
IDC WIN is always working with vendors and insurance carriers, says Ron Madzia, the MGA’s president, to improve the firm’s tech, platforms and systems, whether for the firm’s CMS tool or financial planning software: “If you want to remain competitive, if you want to retain the people you have, you’d better be thinking that way.”
Advisors with Mississauga-based RBC Life Insurance Co. gave their firm a performance rating of 8.0 in technology (up from 7.2 in 2014) and a rating of 7.8 in the CMS category (vs 7.5 last year).
“There have been a lot of improvements in the past two to three years,” says an RBC Life advisor in Ontario.
However, RBC Life advisors rated their firm at 7.3 for its support in developing financial plans for clients, down from 8.5 last year. Many advisors singled out inadequate tech as a contributing factor.
It’s a weakness the firm is determined to address within the next year, says Mike Hamilton, RBC Life’s senior vice president of sales and distribution: “Right now, we’re going through multiple vendors to see what would [provide] the best advantage and talking to our partners at [RBC] Dominion Securities [Inc.] to see what they use for financial planning.”
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