‘Expensive Cost’
“There has not been an influx of younger advisers to replace the advisers who are going to retire,” said Sean Dargan, an analyst at Macquarie Group Ltd., who has an outperform rating on MetLife. “To the extent that their advisers are not productive, it’s an expensive cost.”
The insurer has slimmed down its adviser force since converting in 2000 to a publicly traded company from one owned by policyholders, he said. At the end of 2002, the insurer had 5,846 agents in the MetLife Financial Services career agency system and 3,234 at New England Financial, according to a filing with regulators.
MetLife has agreed to sell two independent broker-dealer affiliates with 850 advisers and about $25 billion in assets under management to Cetera Financial Group Inc. The adviser reduction cited by Steigerwalt doesn’t take into account those people, Shane Winn, a MetLife spokesman, wrote in an e-mail.
The deal allows MetLife to focus on its “core distribution relationships,” including affiliated broker-dealers, Steigerwalt said in an April 5 statement.
The remaining distribution arms sell products such as insurance and mutual funds. MetLife advisers work through agencies like Cypress Financial Group in Florida and Barnum Financial Group in states including New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
MetLife is also moving about 2,600 jobs to North Carolina, to cut costs, including 1,300 in Steigerwalt’s U.S. retail unit. The insurer, which has retreated from banking to end oversight from the U.S. Federal Reserve, had 64,000 employees at the end of 2012, down 3,000 from a year earlier.