FIA gets ready for its 15th industry awards
Every year, the Financial Intermediaries Association (FIA) Awards are hotly anticipated by stakeholders in the financial services industry, who will assemble for the gala dinner at the Sandton Convention Centre on 30 May. The 15th consecutive award ceremo
The glamour belies the astonishingly hard work that goes into the research behind the awards – this year, Bluestream Research (which has been involved in the survey for the past eight years) placed 23500 telephone calls and assessed an unprecedented 7565 contracts during a 10-week period. This makes the FIA awards one of the most comprehensive total industry broker satisfaction benchmarks in the country – no small accolade. Bluestream has applied a consistent methodology, too, which CEO Pieter Aucamp says has been “applied, improved upon and perfected” in this time.
Four ‘core’ disciplines across nine categories
Once again, an award in each of the nine industry categories will include the four ‘core’ disciplines in the financial advice space, that is, employee benefits, financial planning (which includes risk and investment advice), healthcare and short-term insurance. The nine categories are:
• Long Term Insurer of the Year – Risk Products
• Long Term Insurer of the Year – Recurring Savings Products
• Investment Product Supplier of the Year
• Health Care Product Supplier of the Year – open schemes only
• Short-term Personal Lines Insurer of the Year
• Short-Term Commercial Insurer of the Year
• Short-Term Corporate Insurer of the Year
• Employee Benefits Supplier of the Year
• Underwriting Managers of the Year
Last year, Santam snapped up two awards, short-term insurer of the year: personal lines and commercial (it also scooped two awards in 2011 and three back in 2010), while Etana took the honours in the corporate segment.
Sanlam also took two awards – it was named product supplier of the year: investment products single premium (won by Sanlam in 2010) and employee benefits product supplier of the year (it won in the latter category in 2011 too). Discovery Life was named product supplier of the year: investment products recurring premium and Discovery Health took top spot as healthcare product supplier of the year (as was the case in 2011).
Hospitality Industrial & Commercial Underwriting Managers was named underwriting manager of the year and Altrisk the long-term insurer of the year.
So will this year’s results look much the same, or will they be significantly different? This is the question on everyone’s lips ahead of the gala dinner, which should be a glittering affair.
Adapting to a changing environment
Justus van Pletzen, CEO of the FIA, says that this year’s results should give a clear idea as to how members are coping with ongoing changes in the financial services landscape. The tougher regulatory requirements and new direct players in the insurance market have had a profound effect on finance and risk advisors and product providers will be keen to find out just how their distribution and administration services have been received by the advisor community as a whole.
“It will be interesting to see how our finance and risk advisors react to increased competition and the higher compliance burden in terms of acknowledging those product providers that give them the best overall support,” said Van Pletzen.
The 15th award ceremony comes at a special time for the FIA, Van Pletzen says. “We are celebrating five years as a member representative body as well as recognising the product providers that go the extra mile to enable our members to do what they do best – deliver exceptional financial and risk advice to the consuming public.”
Editor’s thoughts:
FAnews will announce the results as soon as they are received. Who do you think will take the honours this year, and why? Comment below or email [email protected].
