Moreover, the PartnerBASE™ database that accompanies the report provides the granular detail behind the analysis, detailing over 500 affinity and partnership marketing initiatives traced by Finaccord for the three product / service types in scope.
In addition, the analysis identifies not only the providers of life insurance, retirement products and financial advice with the most partnerships (overall, and within each category) but also computes 'weighted provider shares of partnerships’. These highlight the providers that are likely to hold the most valuable relationships given both the size of their partners’ customer base and the importance of the categories to which their partners belong as a distribution channel for the three product / service types.
In this report, life insurance is defined as protection-related life insurance not explicitly related to loans including level, increasing and decreasing term risk life, stand-alone critical illness, income protection, over-50s, funeral expenses and life savings insurance (offered for free to their savers by many credit unions). Hence, creditor (payment protection) and all forms of investment-related life insurance are excluded.
Retirement products are defined as including pre-retirement products, split between personal pensions (including group personal and stakeholder pensions), SIPPs (self-invested personal pensions) and workplace pensions, plus two types of at-retirement product, namely equity release products (sometimes referred to as lifetime mortgages) and annuities (including income drawdown).
Meanwhile, financial advice is defined as the provision of advice in broad terms, potentially including the aforementioned products but also including more general advice about subjects such as savings and investments plus tax and estate planning. It excludes cases where distributors only provide advice in relation to their own products (or those of the wider group to which they belong) but includes those where distributors act as tied agents or offer restricted advice in addition to where they provide fully independent advice.
For further information about this research, please access the table of contents and report prospectus by clicking on the corresponding links to the left-hand side of this page, or e-mail
[email protected]. Also, please view our
press release comparing affinity insurance distribution in the UK and US.