Terry Tennens, SAIF’s Chief Executive, has noticed that some insurance brokers are part of a large conglomerate, that was bought a few years ago and recently resold to another conglomerate. This can impact customer service, with remote and untrained customer service handlers that uniquely impacts Funeral Directors who offer a fast and responsive service, that cannot wait. With this in mind, we asked one of the UK’s leading specialists in the funeral sector to comment, Brian Hart of SAIFInsure:
“The word independent has many connotations in different industries and SAIF itself was established to preserve the very independent nature of the family funeral director.
The insurance industry uses the phrase in a different manner. You’ll see many businesses describe themselves as “independent insurance brokers” and many customers will assume this refers to their structure, ownership or culture when in fact this simply means that they have more than one insurance agency with differing insurers.
SAIFInsure is “independently owned” and this is a phrase we will utilise more and more to emphasise to SAIF members and clients that we are not owned by Venture Capital/Asset Management companies or similar like many of our competitors and is seemingly endemic of the insurance broker market.
We pride ourselves on “true independence” and personal service to our customers with your interests to the fore, not those of a corporate master.”
