VIC UPDATE

From Don Glendinning

I hope you’ve all had a great start to the new financial year and that it’s a successful one for you and your businesses.

I’m enjoying the sunny and warm start to spring and can’t wait to get back to the beach, take the kids camping and just enjoy getting outdoors more. I’m also very excited to attend the first ever NHL Ice Hockey game to be played in the southern hemisphere right here in our backyard at Rod Laver Arena between the LA Kings and Arizona Coyotes. This is a huge step in the development of the game I love here in Australia.

The NEOS Victoria and Tasmania team has grown again with the addition of our newest BDC and team member Christine Singh. Christine joins us with more than 20 years of experience in the insurance industry, most recently as an adviser. Christine will be looking after our Tasmanian advisers and as she spends a fair bit of her time in Tasmania, she’ll ensure she’s out and about visiting your practices.

From a business perspective, we also continue to grow as we move towards embedding the NEOS Life Platform into the market and your practices. Most recently, in early July, we made significant product and pricing enhancements

to Encompass Protection as well as pricing improvements to NEOS Protection. You should now see both products in the top quartile for most of your clients.

We’re now focussing on improving the functionality of our technology platform to help you improve the efficiency, and value, of your practice. Our in-force servicing portal will allow you to access client listings, generate quotes on in-force policies, update client details, request data feeds to your CRM, and more. I strongly recommend you start transitioning your clients to the NEOS Life Platform now to maximise the value of this functionality for more of clients as the functionality comes on line.

As always, we appreciate and listen to your feedback. Please reach out to me or the team on what you’d like to see on the NEOS Life Platform.

Finally, if there’s anything else that I or my team can do to help or if you have any colleagues that don’t have an adviser code with NEOS and would like one, please send them our way and we’ll look after them.

Thank you for your continued support and partnership.

NEOS WINS LIFE INSURANCE PRODUCT PROVIDER OF THE YEAR

We’re thrilled to have taken out top spot at the 2023 Money Magazine Consumer Finance Awards, winning the Life Insurance Product Provider of the Year award!

This award follows our recognition as the 2022 AFA Overall Platinum Life Insurance Company of the Year and our recent wins at the 2023 Adviser Ratings’ Adviser Choice Awards, where we swept the boards in the service category for the second year in a row.

We’re honoured that our efforts to provide the best experience, the NEOS Experience, at every touchpoint for advisers and their clients are being recognised.

Our goal now is to make the NEOS Experience even better. We believe that the NEOS Platform will transform the efficiency of the advised life insurance space, allowing advisers to spend more time with their clients instead of dealing with insurers – improving the profitability of adviser practices.

At NEOS, we’re not just imagining what the future of insurance advice could look like – we’re designing and building it.

DON'T MISS OUR FINAL ACCREDITED WEBINAR FOR THIS MONTH!

Our final accredited webinar for this month is on 19 September, where National Underwriting Manager, Steve Colliver, will provide a guide to Financial Underwriting at NEOS for both lump sum and income replacement covers.

The session is accredited for 0.75 CPD hours and will review:

Business and personal financial underwriting
Our approach to underwriting various business structures
Financial evidence
Medical limits

Register here

Keep an eye on our events page for upcoming topics.

Throughout October, we’ll also be diving into the Encompass Protection product in an accredited webinar.

Encompass Protection is one of two high-quality products offered to advisers through the NEOS Life Platform.

This presentation explains everything you need to know about Encompass Protection, including its cover types, options and features, pricing discounts, how to structure cover and key underwriting considerations. Specifically, we’ll cover:

Recap on the NEOS business model
Brief overview of how the NEOS Life Platform works
Encompass Protection in detail
Getting started

Register now. Don’t miss out!

Accredited for 0.75 CPD hours

Tuesday, 3 October, 12pm (Sydney time)

Thursday, 19 October, 12pm (Sydney time)

Register

NEOS WELCOMES A NEW STARTER IN UNDERWRITING

Please welcome our newest member of the underwriting team.

David Wetzler has joined us as a Senior Technical Underwriter. A very well-known and highly regarded professional, David has held a number of underwriting roles across the industry, working at Norwich Union, Aviva and most recently MLC. He brings with him a wealth of knowledge and experience and is a great addition to the team.

NEW NEOS MARKETING PORTAL

As part of our commitment to ensuring we’re always improving our systems and the overall experience for advisers, NEOS will transition to an updated marketing portal at the end of September.

While the url and overall look of the portal will change, your username and functionality will remain the same and all current marketing materials will still be available – you’ll just need to reset your password.

You’ll receive an email next week with the new website link, login details and a step-by-step guide on what you’ll need to do to refresh your access.

So, keep an eye out for the email and make sure you bookmark the new site for future use.

SECURITY UPGRADES ON THE NEOS ADVISER PORTAL

Your clients’ privacy is important to us. That’s why we’re upgrading the security of documents in the NEOS Adviser Portal.

This means from 22 September, most PDF attachments sent to customers will now be password protected with the insured person’s date of birth. We’ll let you and your clients know what you need to do to access these documents.

NEOS PROTECTION CLAIMS UPDATE

Over the last 12 months, NEOS has seen advisers actively supporting their clients throughout the claims process, working with our teams to achieve the best outcomes. This kind of engagement between all parties is great to see and I encourage you to reach out to us during the lodgement process to ensure the best experience for you and any clients you have who need to make a claim.

We’re proud that the NEOS claims team was awarded the 2023 Adviser Ratings Claims Handling award, delivering the NEOS Experience where it matters the most.

Our claims team have provided the following tips to ensure the best claims experience for your clients lodging critical illness or TPD claims:

Critical illness – we always recommend that clients complete a pre-assessment allowing us to establish eligibility quickly, so we can pay your client faster.

Total and permanent disability (TPD)–

We’re seeing a trend that TPD claims are being lodged too early, where the condition treatment has only started, and the recovery has not stabilised. We’d always recommend you speak to the claims team prior to lodgement as this allows us to explain the usual time frames for assessment based on the condition and the current status of the recovery. This ensures the client doesn’t need to undergo unnecessary processes of assessment if medical treatment opinion suggests months of required treatment before they can meet TPD conditions.

STAY WELL WITH VIVO

Vivo is an award-winning health and wellness service available at no additional cost to Encompass Protection customers, registered financial advisers who write Encompass Protection business, practice support staff, and immediate family members*.

Vivo provides you and your clients support throughout life’s journey with easy online access to many services including fitness and nutrition consults, expert medical opinions, and mental health support, to name a few.

Additional specialist services can also be unlocked by Encompass Protection claimants.

Find out how to stay well with Vivo.

LET US KNOW HOW WE'RE DOING

We want to ensure we’re providing solutions to make advisers’ lives easy. So, if there’s anything you feel we could be doing better or if you have any suggestions on how we can improve the NEOS Experience, please let us know.

While this edition of our newsletter has highlighted some of the great successes we’ve recently had, we’re not too proud to think that we can’t be better.

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me as your State Manager or alternatively your BDM. We’d love to hear from you! And of course, positive feedback is also appreciated.

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