Welcome to our final edition of Zurich Adviser News for 2021. It’s been an extremely busy and challenging year for all of us in the advice and life insurance industries. It’s important therefore that I take a few minutes to reflect on and call out some of the important things that have been delivered and achieved during the year to help support you and our industry
Our _ZONE Education platform was instrumental in educating and preparing advisers for the legislative and product changes that came into force in October. The change to Income Protection insurance was a historically significant change. It’s not easy for advisers to navigate the new environment with differentiation in product design across the market. We are committed to working with our advice partners in the months ahead to continue to educate and build confidence and comfort levels in our new product range. Having operated in the Australian market for many years and paid a huge number of claims, we have a good understanding of what changes were required to product design to improve price stability and maximise benefits to customers and we believe we have struck the right balance in this regard.
We recently completed the important milestone of transitioning pre-OneCare OnePath policies from ANZ systems to our Zurich systems. Earlier this year, other OnePath policies were transitioned to Zurich – including Pension and Investments policies in February and Group Risk policies in August. We staged the transition this way to minimise impact to our advisers and customers and are looking forward to our final transition of OneCare policies in March 2022 which will largely complete our integration of OnePath onto Zurich systems. We remain committed to have two product brands in market and are really looking forward to extracting the efficiency and benefits of being on one technology platform.
This transition has allowed us to redesign our client servicing technology, bringing the best of Zurich and OnePath technology suites together under one Adviser Portal. We are committed to continue to invest in The Adviser Portal to make things easier for you to do business with us.
In November we announced that we are providing support to LifeBid which is a business that has a unique combination of skills, deep risk advice expertise and platform development expertise. LifeBid is building an open architecture insurance advice platform that aims to significantly improve efficiency and remove complexity from the risk advice process. The time taken to provide risk advice and review previous advice is at extreme levels and is cost prohibitive. We are proud to stand with LifeBid and some of our industry peers to contribute resources and attempt to fix this problem. You can read more about LifeBid here and register your interest. It’s a very exciting development.
Our business is built on the efforts of our people and the loyalty of our partners. I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your support throughout the year. We are really excited about 2022, demand for advice remains strong, legislative pressure and posture from regulators is improving and technology investment, such as LifeBid is live and happening. Protection is the cornerstone and foundation of good advice, and we look forward to being of service to you as you provide that important advice to your clients.
Thanks again, have a happy and safe Christmas and a well-deserved break with family and friends.
Kind regards,
Kieran