July 15, 2020

News from our members

Canada Life reintroduces Lifestyle Gold Plus and Prestige Options products

Canada Life has recently announced a number of product changes, including the reintroduction of its Lifestyle Gold Plus and Prestige Options products, providing a higher loan-to-value (LTV) for its customers.

The changes by Canada Life offer customers greater flexibility across the entire Lifestyle Options range. The Lifestyle Gold Plus product has a monthly interest rate (MER) of 4.41% and an annualised interest rate (AER) of 4.50%. With its reintroduction, which carries an LTV of 36% at age 70, Canada Life believes it will prove valuable in helping customers access more of their property wealth at this time.

Canada Life’s Lifestyle Options range allow customers access to enjoy a one-off, tax-free cash payment, as well as providing an optional cash reserve facility for an additional 0.20% MER (approx. 0.21% AER) and free valuations with no cap. Payments are also not required, with interest being added to the loan each month, offering customers additional flexibility.

Alongside the Lifestyle Gold Plus addition, Canada Life has also announced the reintroduction of its Prestige Options, a product allowing customers to borrow up to £2 million, designed with high value properties in mind. This is aimed at customers who are not looking to make any monthly payments, and would like to unlock a greater portion of their property wealth.

All Canada Life Lifetime Mortgage products come with optional inheritance guarantee protection and have a no negative equity guarantee.

You can find more information at www.canadalife.co.uk

Laterliving now! appoints Chris South as Laterliving Planner

We are delighted to announce that Chris South has joined us as a Laterliving Planner. Chris South is one of the most well-known and respected Equity Release advisers, having served clients in this specialist area for the past 15 years, and holding continuous membership of the Equity Release Council since inception.

On joining Laterliving now! Chris said “I worked with Simon at a previous firm, and it’s fantastic to do so again, as we share the same ethos and values. Equity release is just one option in retirement financial planning and our role is to ensure that all alternatives are reviewed to ensure the client receives the best advice to achieve their goals.”

Chris becomes the third adviser at Laterliving now! following closely on the appointment of Amanda Hunt, who has over 30 years’ experience working in senior sales, operations and general management positions for Prudential, Scottish Amicable and Tenet Lime, where she was responsible for the Equity Release, mortgage, and protection proposition across the group.

We consider ourselves fortunate in being able to attract advisers of Chris and Amanda’s calibre. They are not only trusted colleagues, but personal friends and together we can better serve our many professional introducers, from whom we continue to receive an increasing number of client referrals.

The firm’s managing director, Simon Chalk commented; “With the FCA having last week having published its key findings from its review of equity release sales and advice process*, it is clear that the sector still has much work to do to improve customer outcomes. These quality appointments demonstrate our commitment to doing the job properly, and we shall continue to lead the sector by example.”

Update from Key Group

Key Group: With the team moving 98% of colleagues to successfully working from home in under two weeks when lockdown was imminent, a small number of team members who need to use business critical systems on site have recently returned to working from the office. While much of the focus has been on helping colleagues, the wider community and customers during the pandemic, Key Group continues to hire and promote staff including the appointment of Jack Neary as Group Technology Director, focusing on technical governance and driving digital transformation across the group to meet customer’s changing expectations.

With growing interest in referral opportunities, Key Group’s referral arm – Key Partnerships – have also signed deals with Tenet Group and Paradigm Mortgage Club with advisers being able to refer clients who are better suited to equity release through The Equity Release Experts, the specialist whole of market advice delivery division.

Key: Following a successful end to Q1 2020, Key launched its new look Market Monitor in May, which highlighted year on year growth with total borrowing in Q1 of £1.2 billion.  Using the detailed customer information around personal and financial circumstances captured through its new digital advice delivery platform, Key was also – in an industry first – able to provide more insight around the relative weighting of different wants/needs in terms of how the money released is being used. For example, while 32% of over-55s spend some of the proceeds of equity release on holidays, only 8% of total proceeds are actually spent on this purpose. This ground-breaking analysis suggests that needs based requirements are often the main driver of equity release with aspirational reasons such as cars, holidays etc being more incidental. Key is also delighted to have received recognition in various industry awards including the Financial Reporter Awards (Best Equity Release Broker).

more2life :With many advisers continuing to work hard to support their customers despite the pandemic, more2life has focused on keeping advisers informed, guaranteeing rates and terms for a period of six months from the date of application and hosting regular informative webinars. With lockdown easing and more physical valuations possible, more2life has decided to take a dual track approach, alongside valuation partner e.surv, using a combination of physical and remote valuations to support a wide range of later life lending customers. As we begin to consider what a post-pandemic equity release market looks like, the lender will continue to support advisers with the right digital tools they need in order to succeed, whilst helping to keep the equity release market moving.

Advise Wise commitment to the environment

Advise Wise is committed to offering the latest technology solution, providing advisers with an advanced and intuitive platform to source equity release plans alongside with its integrated Mortgage Club and dedicated support. We are on a mission using innovative technology to make things more efficient and to reduce paper usage in the later life market.

As an online and agile company, we can make the most of technology and promote a more eco-friendly paperless way of doing business. But we also want to play our part actively, trying to reduce our environmental footprint.

The financial industry is still digitally behind and a paper heavy sector, where the habit to manually print tons of documents is still very persistent. The consumption of paper reaches huge volumes every year and forests and tree plantations are the primary source of fibre to produce these high volumes.

  • World paper consumption exceeds 400 million tonnes per year.
  • One office employee consumes 10,000 sheets of paper every year. Approximately, 500 sheets per ream, 4 boxes of sheets.

Digitalising processes in full will be a long journey, but we want to start playing our part actively in the meantime.  This is why at Advise Wise we encourage the use of technology to reduce the paper usage and for every KFI generated through the Platform we’ll plant a tree where it’s needed most.

Find out more by visit advisewise.com

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