Home  My Blog Show All Blog Setback now, but a silver lining is coming
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Setback now, but a silver lining is coming |
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Written by Wilfred Ling
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Thursday, 06 September 2007 |
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Recently I have been overwhelmed by the administration of arranging the policy contracts for shield plans for my clients. The shield plan products have become so extremely complex that our liability is exponentially increasing.
For one week I was sadden by non-disclosure problems from a group of clients which I had to quickly advice them to invoke their freelook because of breach of good faith. It was so exhausting and when the dusts have not settled, I was hit by another administration problem with another group of clients who had received the wrong advice from me because I was wrongfully advised by the insurer itself. I had to spent hours explaining to the clients and at the end of the day absorbed the potential liability. The insurer that wrongly advised me will get away with no problem because I am the licensed adviser, not the insurer. I find this not fair at all but having chosen this path, there is no turning back. Altogether so many policies that I had to quickly cancel it under freelook because of these problems that I really wonder why in the first place am I selling shield plans? To be sure, I don’t actively market any insurance product per se. But clients always ask for it. That’s the “problem”. This class of product carries the largest liability risk to the adviser given is highly complex nature and needless to say the worst commission. After factoring transport etc the net commission is negative. It is really like giving money to the client indirectly in this way. I think it is really crazy and frankly I confess that since I started this work that I have never felt so discouraged by such happenings before. The silver lining to me is that for the next few weeks, I am launching an absolutely exciting investment platform. At least it is extremely exciting for me because the new investment platform is ready for activation. With this new platform, the investment vehicles I can use for managing my clients’ portfolio is virtually unlimited. Ranging from hedge funds, structured certificates, commercial properties (not those REITs and not a property fund), exchange traded fund (ETFs) at any stock exchanges , Vanguard’s passive funds and any unit trusts in the world besides our Singapore own unit trusts. No more am I restricted to Singapore’s pre-approved investment schemes. The flipside to this is that the minimum portfolio size must be at least S$200,000 because this is set by MAS (not me!). I think this is much more exciting then selling shield plans which had brought me great despair.. For those who wants a hint of what this is new investment all about, google the key words “portfolio bond isle of man” Give Your Comments |
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