The new service commences with the backing of four major product providers (Norwich Union, Prudential, Friends Provident, Standard Life) with other providers already under development for forthcoming releases.
Prior to launching its service, Webline conducted its own research and sought the opinions of advisers and providers to ensure that its new offering was markedly different from, and more advanced than, the existing systems available in the marketplace. Research into the market established:
1. Current systems were predominantly used to achieve an indicative guide as to the buying power of a fund value across the range of primary annuity providers in the market place.
2. Once the most competitive provider has been determined, a personalised illustration was obtained and included the relevant splits of protected rights benefits and so on.
3. The sales process and compliance requirements dictated that the various annuity options were highlighted and this meant that an adviser typically requested quotes that covered a range of options and benefits such as -
- Spouse's benefits
- Guaranteed payment periods
- Escalation of income in payment
4. It was found that existing systems were unable to support this process and manage all the varying parameters in one quotation process.
5. The resulting quotation-to-proposal ratios were therefore high – approaching 30 quotes were requested for a single piece of business. Where impaired health conditions applied, this required additional enquiries from a wider range of providers, increasing the number of quotes even further. This obviously benefited online service providers which charge the life offices and / or intermediaries on a quotation basis, but made life for the adviser incredibly difficult with the quotation process becoming a protracted one.
Paul Holland, managing director, Webline, explains: “The prospect of implementing a complete electronic processing system for the annuity market as a whole is some way off. At present the sales process and, indeed, compliance requirements in the market place, are not conducive to a smooth workflow, meaning that quotation systems have been unable to add as much value as they might have liked. Webline has taken a different approach to these issues, and we believe our system gives advisers the first really fast and effective alternative to paper-based annuity quotation research.”
The adviser can determine a range of pre-set options for any particular quote and Webline’s new annuity service automatically requests these from the participating providers, and then presents them in a usable table format. This makes life much easier for the intermediary, who only needs to enter the basic client data once. The tabulated results quickly show the impacts on a client's buying power by building up the selected options on screen, thereby demonstrating the cost of bolting on each such option. Users may easily look at and compare different choices. This not only eases the sales process for advisers and clients, but also provides sufficient information to allow an adviser to adequately compare ‘income drawdown’ against a traditional annuity purchase (as required under FSA regulation)
Using this approach, the service makes a number of assumptions in order to show a "like for like" comparison between providers, so the results have adequate wording to explain the limitations of this step. Once the intermediary has completed this provider-by-provider comparison, they may then choose one provider in order to obtain a company and client specific illustration after adding extra detail such as pre / post ‘98 benefit splits.
Phase 1 of the Webline launch accommodates an annuity rate comparison for a generic fund value, and precludes protected rights splits and similar variations. Phase 2 will follow later, and addresses the additional complexities associated with such splits.
Steve Young, e-commerce manager of Friends Provident, comments: " The advantage the Webline system has over other services is the ability to get accurate figures, complete with a printable quotation from the product provider. The user interface developed is intuitive and the results screens are structured in a way to help the adviser compare and contrast both different companies’ figures and the cost of the various options. This service has obviously been well thought through with the needs of the adviser / sales process in mind”
As usual, Webline will offer advisers the ability to obtain quotes by logging on to their secure adviser service ("B2B"), and will also provide IFAs with the ability to include quotes for consumers within their own websites ("B2B2C"). The service will be restricted to non-impaired life quotes in the first phase - impaired life quotes are planned for a later enhancement.
