Challenger Life has stepped up its push into the retirement income streams mar-ket with the introduction of an online quote service for annuities.
Challenger claims the service is the first of its kind offered in Australia pro-viding advisers with immediate quotes which can take more than 24 hours in other companies.
“Life companies quote annuity rates in one of two ways,” says Brett Newman, Challenger Life general manager. “Either the adviser phones in the clients de-tails and the company the
Challenger Life has stepped up its push into the retirement income streams mar-ket with the introduction of an online quote service for annuities.
Challenger claims the service is the first of its kind offered in Australia pro-viding advisers with immediate quotes which can take more than 24 hours in other companies.
“Life companies quote annuity rates in one of two ways,” says Brett Newman, Challenger Life general manager. “Either the adviser phones in the clients de-tails and the company then sends back a quote by fax or the life company sup-plies software which calculates the rate.”
“The problem with phoning in the quote is the answer may take a while to come back, while the problem with software packages is that rates can change every week.”
Newman says the online service gives advisers instant response and the flexibil-ity to play around with the type of annuity which best suits the client.
The new service is part of the re-positioning of Challenger Life as a retirement income specialist. Since Challenger purchased Equity Life from the Helm Corpora-tion about a year ago, the group has aggressively sought to gain a major grip on the retirement income market by offering some of the highest rates on annuities.
“We estimate that we now hold around 5 per cent of the short-term annuities mar-ket in Australia and, while figures are less readily available for complying long-term annuities as they have only been available since last September, we believe we currently hold around 10 per cent of the market,” Newman says.
Newman says Challenger is able to follow that strategy due to their low over-heads.
“Because we do not offer traditional risk products such as life and disability insurance, we don’t have to cross-subsidise other parts of the business.”
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