Fee-only financial advisors striving to help clients cope with the coronavirus will be able to temporarily access an insurance management platform dedicated to fiduciary-friendly products.
Louisville, Ky.-based DPL Financial Partners announced on Monday it will make its turnkey platform offering fee-based annuities and other insurance products designed for fiduciaries free for financial advisors for the next three months. Normally, advisors have to pay a membership fee to access DPL’s platform.
“Advisors want to know how to respond,” said David Lau, CEO and founder of DPL Financial Partners. “Their revenues are based off of AUM and the market volatility has hit those revenues hard. Not to mention their clients are asking about these products because they’re worried.”
According to Lau, DPL has experienced a surge in inquiries from advisors seeking new solutions for their clients.
Advisory clients are hearing about annuities from all sorts of providers, said Lau, many of whom do not operate in the fee-only space. These providers threaten to steal market share away from fiduciaries.
Lau described a recent conversation with a fiduciary who had lost $2 million from a client who was sold a fixed-indexed annuity by a third-party provider.
“Some fee-only advisors may have inadvertently harmed their clients with investment-only portfolios because they couldn’t use the commissioned products of the past,” said Lau. “Advisors can bill on the annuities on this platform, so they will not lose revenue when allocating to an annuity, and because you’ve taken the commission out, you’ve ended up repricing these products so they can provide better value for the consumer.”
As part of the offering, DPL will launch a weekly series of three webinars to help non-members acclimate to the world of commission-free annuities starting next week.
Lau says that DPL consultants also stand ready to help members and non-members alike navigate their clients through the financial turmoil.
“We have 20 consultants on staff,” said Lau. “They can help find the right product to address the client’s need, whether it’s finding principle protection or income or another need, and then we can execute on that product and deliver it to the advisor as an asset under management.”