ING has announced it will begin to offer a new range of back office services to advisers who work within its distribution arms or make use of ING products externally.
The service, dubbed ING Adviser Solutions is split into two areas, Professional and Marketing Solutions, with the first addressing how a planner can establish and operate a business while the second cover how planners can continue to grow their business.
According to Adviser Solutions assistant general manager Graham Peatey the services will compete with the likes of Zurich’s Dealer Back Office Service, 360 and Jim Stackpool’s Strategic Consulting and Training.
“The difference in this service is that it is a full service across all parts of an advisers business with a specialist team that will focus only on this area alone,” Peatey says.
This unit will be headed up by Graham Peatey in the role of assistant general manager, under Les Clayton, with Richard Klipin heading the marketing solutions arm while David Forrest will head the professional solutions arm.
The service is being targetted at key advisers, which Peatey defines as those key advisers associated with top firms and clients, with varying costs dependent on the services requested.
“There will be differential pricing for those within an ING dealer group compared to external advisers. We will research the level of work and come back with a price dependent on that,” Peatey says.
“Our base price for the service is $2500 but planners can pick and choose accordingly.”
Peatey is aware that the costs may sound high but says since it is targetted at key advisers they are used to paying for reliable information and services.
“It is not the cheapest but is the best total solution based on relationships we have built so far. We have the intellectual property to create long term business improvements for advisers,” Peatey says.
While building adviser business and relationships with them Peatey says the group also hopes to grow the ING share of business that advisers write and expand the group’s and the adviser’s brand in the market.
“We are also aiming at keeping high level planners within ING and that is why our target is the top 30 per cent of advisers,” Peatey says.
According to Peatey the service has been round in parts for many years but this was the first time it has been combined with a unified team and offered.
“It was rolled out to business development managers a month ago and is available at the moment to planners and so in its current form it is only about a month old.”
