The Life Insurance Association Singapore is reviewing policies around the recruitment of rival agents.
Singapore's Insurance body is planning new guidelines on agent recruitment and plans to issue them to its members in the near future. The battle for financial services talent in the city state has in the recent past been dominated by wealth managers moving whole teams to rival banks.
Prior to the Global financial crisis several high profile team moves made the headlines but ground to a halt once Citi took legal action against a team move to a rival Swiss bank.
The latest action comes after the mass migration of 300 or so Great Eastern agents to rival AIA's newly set up financial advisory arm, AIA Financial Advisers. The move is said to have effectively weakened the Great Eastern agency resources by almost 10 percent.
New Challenger
The Straits Times reports that one of the new Life Insurance Association (LIA) guidelines will specify the number of months during which migrated agents have to be accompanied by managers at their client meetings. Currently, agents with more than two years' experience and with a gap of no more than 12 months from their previous appointment are typically exempted from this requirement.
Implementing the new parameters will help address concerns about potential mis-selling or churning of policies by agents under pressure to meet sales targets at their new firms.
As part of the insurer's move to strengthen its distribution network, AIA Singapore established a new business to challenge the dominance of local banks. A wholly-owned subsidiary of AIA Singapore, AIA Financial Advisers (AIA FA) is a financial advisory firm that complements AIA Singapore’s tied Agency distribution channel.
