He will assist Ailo’s executive team with propositional developments and their delivery to Ailo members.

Willoughby has over 40 years’ experience working in the life insurance sector and has been working with, and for, Ailo in a number of roles since he attended his first meeting back in November 1993.

More recently as managing director of Acuity Corporate Consulting, he has devised much of Ailo’s eLearning programme aimed at next gen entering the sector as well as being a regular speaker at Ailo events.

Bob Pain, Ailo chief executive, said: “I’m very much looking forward to working with Simon and the organisation and energy that I’m sure he’ll bring to delivering worthwhile propositional developments for the Ailo membership.

“Simon has a wealth of experience that will be invaluable as we begin to roll out some exciting plans that we have for the association this year as we continue to celebrate our 35th anniversary.”

No more have these changes been evident than in the area of staff training and development.

While eLearning has been commonplace for standard topics such as Health and Safety in 2022, anti-money laundering and GDPR for some years, pre-pandemic face-to-face classroom-style instruction was still a major element of training deliverables within many organisations.

The cross-border life sector was no different in this regard.

However, as the pandemic hit, the need to provide remote learning for staff who WFH became a necessity and, without a general return to the office, training room facilities were typically given over to socially distanced desk layouts, much of which is still in place.

In the space of less than six months, the world of training moved from partially online to largely fully online and is unlikely to swing back as the pandemic recedes.

Face-to-face increasingly a thing of the past

The Insurance Distribution Directive (IDD) requires all the employees of all EU/EEA and UK life companies and intermediaries post-Brexit, involved in the process of selling and servicing policies to customers to successfully complete 15 hours of relevant CPD training each year.

The purpose of this is to ensure that all life company and intermediary staff dealing with customers have a broad understanding of their needs and the terms and conditions of the policies they distribute.

Since March 2020, it has proved a significant challenge to switch from providing this sort of technical training, which was generally on a face-to-face basis, to delivering it via the remote medium of eLearning.

One example of how to to adapt a learning approach to suit the new environment can be seen in the joint venture between life sector consultancy firm Acuity and eLearning specialists Governance People.

The Life Insurance Professional Development Programme consists of 15 one-hour eLearning modules, each with its own Knowledge Check and CPD accreditation for their successful completion.

The modules cover topics as diverse as financial advice and succession planning, legal principles and consumer protection, pensions and business ethics, distribution models and the Solvency II Directive. The programme builds knowledge from the bottom up to improve the effectiveness of all staff whilst meeting the regulatory requirements.

It’s the first purpose-built programme that specifically covers the content of the IDD as stipulated in the directive while being designed as a complete sequential eLearning programme that provides staff at all levels with a broad overview of the life sector.

The programme runs on a dedicated learning management system (LMS), but it can be customised to run on a life company’s own LMS. The modules are currently in English, but there’s also a capability to develop other language versions as required.

Simon Willoughby of Acuity Corporate Consulting said: “In setting out to develop the Life Insurance Professional Development Programme, the aim was not only to meet the regulatory requirements of the IDD, but to deliver the content in a way that’s accessible and capable of being understood by all levels of staff, providing them with good understanding of how the whole sector works and their role within it.”

In the video above, Simon Willoughby talks about how he got started in the industry as an adviser and shares a story about a memorable incident involving a dog and his briefcase.

The service is called ‘product oversight and governance (Pog)’ and it is designed to help insurers deal with issues that affect both them and the financial advisers who recommend their products to clients.

Under the EU Insurance Distribution Directive (IDD) and non-EU Conduct of Business Codes, cross-border life companies now need to ensure that:

• Customers are treated fairly at all stages of the contractual relationship;
• The products promoted meet the needs of customers at outset and on an ongoing basis; and
• Any conflicts of interest in the distribution delivery chain are managed appropriately.

This presents a series of regulatory product oversight and governance challenges for the life companies that includes monitoring the way their products are distributed.

Details of Pog service

Acuity’s Pog service helps insurance firms meet their product oversight and governance responsibilities under the regulations outlined above.

It is focused on delivering external, independent and objective assessments, based on qualitative or quantitative research that Acuity conducts covering issues such as:

• Target client market verification;
• Product concept testing;
• Customer-facing communication testing; and
• Ongoing product monitoring.

To ensure its Pog service will cover markets as diverse as the UK, Europe, Middle East and Asia; Acuity told International Adviser that it uses its relationships with adviser groups and trade bodies around the world to source advisers and target market clients to take part in research.

Meeting regulatory requirements objectively

Simon Willoughby, managing director of Acuity, said: “Establishing a product oversight and governance (Pog) group and designing a compliant product approval process will be driven by the life company and generally managed internally.

“However, conducting all the Pog analysis on an internal basis risks the regulatory accusation of the life company ‘marking its own homework’; especially if it surveys its existing policyholders rather than prospective target customers, believes its distributors to be a proxy for the end customer or relies on the feedback of its own sales team.

“The issue for cross-border life companies is how to meet their new regulatory requirements objectively.

“We work with the product oversight and governance groups or the marketing and product development teams within the life companies to specify the parameters of the research required.

“We then work with our network of partners to deliver independent and objective reports quickly and cost effectively,” Willoughby added.

He will work alongside Simon Willoughby, who relaunched the company in November 2017 after he left Utmost Wealth Solutions.

As founding directors of the original business in 2001, the intervening years have seen Acuity exist in several forms under Low and Willoughby’s ownership as the duo pursued different ventures in and around the cross-border life market.

Going back on tour

“I’m not sure whether Bryan and I represent the lead singer and guitarist or the bass player and drummer, but we’re certainly both a lot older and, hopefully, a little wiser since the original ‘band’ was formed,” Willoughby joked.

“For us, I guess it has been rather less of the rock’n’roll lifestyle and more like, to misquote Ian Dury & The Blockheads, ‘Mifid, Priips and RDR’.”

Low, who left Provisca in March 2019, added: “In recent months, we found that we were collaborating on a number of assignments, so ‘reforming the band’ under a common Acuity brand made sense, as it allows us to develop the business in tandem and bring a complementary skillset to our clients.

“We are able to bring our combined industry experience and insight together in a way which helps client companies achieve their strategic plans.”