Brokers favour select group of products

And who could blame them? The Manulife brand is one of the strongest in Canada’s financial services industry. With somewhere near 1.1 million individual life policies active in Canada, 3.5 million Canadians are using its products and services in one way or another. At the end of the first quarter, Manulife had $34.7 billion in assets under management throughout its insurance business, which includes primarily life policies, group policies and living benefits. There are 24,000 advisors pushing its products, so why not go with the flow?

Whether advisors are selling product or their services is as open to debate among the insurance advisors as it is in the other distribution channels. “You know, some people look to their agent to work for them, but I know better,” says one independent insurance advisor from Nova Scotia. “It’s really what you make of it,” he says, in reference to the kinds of products made available to clients.

A colleague elsewhere in the same province disagrees, saying Canadians place a priority in dealing with an agent they like. “Staying in this business is a function of the individual, not the brand,” says the agent, who also sells Manulife products.

She may have a point. Not many Canadians could tell the difference between the offerings of the top companies: Manulife, Canada Life Assurance Co., Standard Life Assurance Co., Sun Life Financial Services of Canada Inc., Great-West Life Assurance Co. or London Insurance Group Inc. But the agents themselves know better.

Another name that came up almost as often as Manulife was Maritime Life Assurance Co. Once a regional outfit, Maritime Life was founded in the 1920s in Nova Scotia and was one of the country’s smallest insurers. It wasn’t until 1956 that Maritime Life opened its first branch outside of Atlantic Canada, in Kingston, Ont. In 1969 it was purchased by Boston-based John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance Co. and throughout the ’70s began aggressively expanding across Canada. Although its head office is still located in Halifax, it now has the Maritime Life Tower in downtown Toronto, securing, at least symbolically, a national presence.

Maritime Life now has 16,000 advisors selling its products and has investible assets of more than $14 billion, including $773 million in individual life premiums. One Newfoundland advisor who listed Maritime as his favourite key supplier offered a compliment: “It’s middle of the road. Some manufacturers will be good at one thing, but never all. Maritime is pretty good across the board.”

If it can be said that there are those advisors who believe in brands and those who believe in the services the individual advisor offers, it should also be said that there are skeptics in between who embrace the brand and question it simultaneously.

“They just get larger all the time. Once a company gets big enough, the service begins to suffer,” says one Hub Group Ltd. advisor in the West. “I use RBC Insurance Inc. They do things quicker, easier, and it’s local.”

Local in this case is subjective. Branches may be local, but RBC Insurance is located in Toronto, more than 2,700 kilometres away. Even so, some of the advisors we interviewed agree: bigger rarely means better.

“They just get taken over,” says an independent Ontario advisor. “We’ll work with the ones that are left.”

It certainly is easy to see how little one manufacturer might differ from another, but the fact remains that a manufacturer has a major impact on how an advisor does his or her business.

Although an MGA or insurance broker may supply some back office, it’s usually the manufacturer supplying the customer support, the materials, tools and literature that are needed to pull in new customers. Most manufacturers even supply the client statements, although a common gripe is that they don’t always send copies to the advisors.