Country Folk

A few months ago, your humble burningpants correspondent was working with a large insurance company in their annual planning session, setting up the go-to-market strategies for the year ahead.

We were deep in the Hunter Valley at a town that had all the signs it had once been prosperous and had relatively recently been ravaged by the unraveling of rural economies.

Sure, the gracious main street was still there, red brick commercial buildings with wide verandahs and giant front windows, but all signs of life were dead.

Things had clearly changed.

The talk in the meeting turned to country planners – that vast unseen army of financial planners who live outside the CBD and service the small cities that they live in and get little of the love that being close to the head office provides.

This insurance company insisted that they had a great relationship with the country planners and that they knew this because their BDM network told them that they did.

Here at burningpants though, we are really only interested in empirical data so at that meeting we resolved that as soon as practical, the next interstate trip wouldn’t be by plane, but by road, taking in the small cities that dot the highway between Sydney and Melbourne, meeting planners and finding out how life was for them.

This week that research is complete and for a start, the GFC and the retreat of the banks has hit them very hard – harder than the folks in the city can imagine. Essentially all business apart from risk effectively stopped for them.

Those that have prospered have enjoyed the coverage of a licensee. Despite the geographic difference between city and country, it’s clear that the licensee plays a critical role in ensuring that insurance services and planning services are provided in the country and that these planners know it; they were all supportive of the work that licensees do.

But what was most revealing about the tour was that the Future of Financial Advice (FoFA) reforms are really irrelevant for country planners.

For planners – even in the medium sized towns that we visited like Wagga, Wangaratta, Albury and Wodonga, not only do they know their clients, they are forced by and large by geography and circumstance to be intimate with them.

All of the planners we interviewed essentially laughed off the effect of FoFA, particularly Opt-in, on their businesses.

“How can I,” one of them said, “be forced to get to know my clients better?” I see them not just once a year – but persistently – there are few places in Wagga that I can go where I will not either bump into or see my clients. In some ways there is no escape.”

“This morning I went to the chemist to get a prescription for my wife, he’s a client – so I picked up the antibiotics and we talked briefly about insurance for his daughter’s car. How does FoFA even begin to cover that kind of relationship?”

In the view of this particular planner, the reforms are just a tax – more paper work to fill in.

What was also interesting from the research was which companies are strong in the regions. AXA, MLC and Tower were well regarded by all the planners that we spoke to, particularly Tower in regional Victoria appears to be punching above its weight.