Important update – Asteron Life

On 28 February 2019, we completed our purchase of Suncorp's Australian life insurance business, Asteron Life. Since this time, we have been undertaking a thorough review of our business and operating model across both brands in order to create a single, market-leading life insurer.

At the same time we have been looking at ways in which we can serve our customers and advisers better and set up our business to be sustainable for the long-term.

In the interests of giving clarity and certainty to both our people and our partners, we worked to complete the review as swiftly as possible.

What has become very clear as a result of that review, is that in order to deliver the best outcomes for our customers and advisers, we need to simplify our Retail business model.

Since acquiring Asteron Life, we have also gained a deeper understanding of the new business performance of the Asteron Retail product, which is not sustainable. This is particularly important in the current Retail market, which is undergoing structural change.

TAL believes it is in customers' and advisers' best interest not to offer two similar retail propositions in the Retail market.

With these factors in mind, we will be undertaking a restructure and realignment of Retail new business, business development and underwriting across both brands, and this will include removing the Asteron product from sale for new customers from 1 July 2019.

For existing Asteron customers and advisers, there will be no change to the way in which they interact with the product or services provided by TAL. This will also have no impact on our ability to service advisers or customers on existing Asteron or TAL policies.

We remain committed to ensuring the Asteron retail life insurance product remains relevant and up to date post 1 July 2019 for existing Asteron customers, in the same way we do for TAL customers today.

We believe having a single retail proposition creates a simpler business structure and a more efficient service model. This allows us to provide better value propositions for customers and adviser partners.

It will also provide our advisers and customers with clarity on how best to access TAL's core capabilities and our market-leading proposition.

We remain fully committed to the strong relationships with IFAs, Licensees, Institutional APLs and Platforms that currently exist and we are looking forward to working with you as we move to this new structure.

The restructure and realignment is now complete. If you have any questions please reach out to your local Sales Development Manager.

You can access our Asteron adviser FAQ document  here.

 

Yours sincerely, 

 

Brett Clark

TAL Group CEO and Managing Director

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