Letters of Authority
Rebecca_Tuck
Member
in General
Hi all,
Not entirely sure where this fits, but would anyone mind sharing their process around Letters of Authority / making sure that you have all necessary information for new clients? (who sends them, any double checks, etc?)
There seem to be several stages where our process falls down at the moment:
- policies being entirely missed at the initial stage LOAs are prepared/sent
- information only being gathered for one element of a plan (e.g. an AVC but not the actual DB scheme)
- the information that does come back being insufficient and not followed-up
In your teams, who has responsibility for this? Has anyone got it nailed?
Thank you!
Becca
Comments
My administrator has a check list of what to look for and if she cannot find it she calls the provider and gets it. The checklist also has a summary of why the information is being requested and how we use it so they understand the relevance and importance.
During meeting copy documents are given to admin by planner, so that LOAs can be prepared immediately and signed during that meeting.
We have standard template letters that go off with them and act as a checklist for admin when it comes back in. When all information is received it goes to Paraplanning to review and then onto the planner when compiled.
Seems to work okay, biggest challenge is always the providers! Zurich are currently quoting 22-25 working days for some PPP plans.
Ruth Baker
We have one page sheet filled in by the administration team, and a collated table using the information from the one sheet.
We try to make sure that the paraplanners look at the info first to explain to the admin team what's required (for example, kinks in a particular product). The LOA letter/email is templated to request everything we could expect to need and only tweaked if there is a kink.
Then back to the paraplanner to review and take forward from there.
Hi everyone,
That's a great help, thanks, Looks like we might need to trial getting involved from a technical standpoint initially, to double check what we're actually asking for and explain why, then the rest should (hopefully) be plain sailing data gathering from there!
We've recently had an experienced and brilliant administrator join us - it's amazing! I initially wrote a process stating I would check info requests before they go out. I do want to look at a pension switch, DBTV
or some investment other than pension GIA or ISA before they're sent out (the adviser give indication in file note with LOAs). However in most cases this isn't needed if your templates are good and complete with 'if this/that/other' and we don't really want to be constantly interrupting or waiting for the other.
In all cases, our admin will set up the 'prepare recommendation report' task in IO for me with an immediate due date at the same time he sends the LOA off. This way I have an idea of what is coming up, can chat with the adviser and admin if needed, etc etc, then change the due date on the IO task for something more sensible.