St George is to expand aggressively into the insurance space through its financial planning dealership, Securitor.
According to St George executive for wealth and Asgard wealth solutions chief executive Geoff Lloyd, planners would be given extensive education, training, plus delivery and reporting mechanisms so they can implant Insurance as part of the overall value proposition of their practice.
"We are going to develop more of a distribution culture around that channel and more importantly make it easy for financial planners to move from managed funds and [direct] equities, to insurance," Lloyd said.
Insurance would be developed as a separate asset class and place on the groups , perceived as the poor cousin of managed funds within the advice world, would be a major pillar of the group's growth strategy going forward, Lloyd said.
The group will develop dedicated risk advisors, and to highlight the priority placed on the strategy former Securitor head, Sean West, earlier this week became St George insurance general manager.
"If you look at the environment of the market Australians for some time now have been very, very underinsured and there is an insurance gap there," Lloyd said.
"On the life and risk side it's become more complex and I think in a way the fact that people have their own staff super funds with insurance embedded in them they think they are covered, but the reality is that when it come to policies such as trauma and income protection the level of life cover they have won't be enough."
The placing of insurance on platforms was a long term goal of the group, but as yet Lloyd could give no time line as to when that could be achieved.
