It is great news that Association of Medical Insurance Intermediaries (AMII) members voted to allow insurer membership.
This gives me great hope that AMII will continue to thrive given its members are obviously all on side. But I can appreciate that there are a few intermediaries that may have felt that AMII should stay intermediary-only.
There are situations when intermediaries are competing with an insurer's direct sales force for business but in my view AMII is all about intermediated advice. I would never want to hear AMII supporting directly-sold PMI and I am sure allowing insurers to become members will not compromise this position.
In these tough times when the individual PMI marketplace is in decline, we should all be working together to promote the industry. This AMII move makes absolute sense and let's be frank, this was the only option. If it had continued as it was, this year's Summit would possibly have been the last. The 2012 Summit was so useful and informative that this would have been a great loss.
Running any business can be a lonely place and to go to the summit and know that there are 120+ other businesses in a similar position is really reassuring. Hearing other intermediaries asking industry-specific challenging questions gave me a great sense of "we're in this together" and there is no other forum that could replace it.
And the news that Bupa (soon-to-be first insurer AMII member when contracts have been signed) is re-launching its adviser-distributed individual PMI product is a huge relief. We are mostly SME-focussed but we felt awkward telling group leavers and other clients that we could not offer them a Bupa solution.
There was never any chance that we would simply introduce the client to Bupa for a small fee, that did not make any sense to us at all. We have to be able to represent our clients and we tell them that we will hold their hand in the event of a problem with their insurer.
How could we have held their hand by simply handing the client over to Bupa? Who knows what will happen next with Bupa's individual offering but it is great news for the industry that they are now supporting the intermediated individual channel.
Debbie Kleiner-Gaines is managing director of Best Health Business
