Client Profile
Healthy Investment (HI) is a friendly society committed to providing ethical savings and investments. As a mutual friendly society, Healthy Investment is owned by and run for the sole benefit of its members.
They provide a range of Friendly Society Tax Exempt Savings Plans (TESP), ISAs, Single Premium Investment Bonds (SPB’s) and Child Trust Funds which are sold either via IFAs or Introducers.
SDA has been advising HI since 2003.
Brief
On 1st January 2013 the Retail Distribution Review (RDR) came into effect. This introduced new rules on the ability for an investment adviser (IFA) to receive commission payments direct from the life company on the sale of any savings contract. Commission payment were replaced by ‘adviser charging’ direct to the client.
The existing product range offered by HI to IFAs included an allowance for commission payments. In order for HI to be RDR compliant it meant repricing HI’s savings products.
Approach
The process followed by SDA for this task was:
- Agreed with HI what range of saving products they required post RDR. This ranged from Tax Exempt Savings Plans to Investment bonds.
- Agreed with HI the timetable for delivery of new products and cost of the repricing.
SDA was able to produce new premium rates for the TESP and new charges for the ISAs and SPBs that were RDR compliant.
SDA also assisted HI in producing new business illustrations including Key Facts documents that were RDR compliant.
In order to ensure that the Society continued to thrive after the introduction of the Retail Distribution Review a redesign of our entire range of products and systems was required.
The work undertaken by SDA, on what for us was a significant project, helped to ensure our deadlines were achieved and our products ready for launch by the implementation date. Despite the complexities of the project SDA understood the needs of the society and help guide us through the technical and regulatory complexities.
– Peter Green
Chief Executive, Healthy Investment