FAPCO Life And Benefits Division
In Good Health
Terri Tozier
In the late 1970s and early’ 80s, multi-line insurers encouraged many of their property casualty agents to venture beyond selling only the traditional property casualty insurance products and also offer products designed to protect the financial life, limb, and security of their clients. In 1980, Robert Anderson took steps to create a new division at F. A. Peabody Company( FAPCO) focused exclusively on this trend and began hiring staff. By 1985, life agent Richard Hammond started growing the division into the vision of a multi-line advisory agency offering a variety of financial services: life, disability, health and long-term care insurance, and retirement programs.
With a growing service load from the burgeoning health insurance business, a continued focus on retirement planning, and further demands on Hammond’ s time with starting a new venture— FAPCO Administrative Services— Max Lynds was hired in 1993 to assist in the efforts.
Vicki Hagerman, Max Lynds, Carlie Woodworth
Heidi White
Lynds’ s background working for a large life insurer made him instrumental in moving the Life and Benefits division forward. He continues in this role today as our vice president of the Life and Benefits division, which now employs five people.
Max has witnessed many changes in the laws surrounding benefits products, especially with health insurance. Today there are far fewer group health insurance companies doing business in Maine as in the past, as insurers consolidated, merged or left the state due to the regulatory reforms requiring Maine to guarantee issuance of health coverage for smaller groups. The Affordable Care Act enacted in 2014 caused another wave of change in the industry. Today there are only five health insurers, and only three serving the under-65 market, in Maine.
Another major change occurred when the sale of life insurance trended from predominantly whole-life to term-life insurance products. Whole, or“ permanent,” life insurance is designed to create taxdeferred savings to fund a person’ s estate, trust, and educational needs. Term-life, or“ term,” insurance provides that same protection but expires when the policy ends, with no savings mechanism. Term insurance is a simpler and less expensive purchase, often not requiring the assistance of an agent. This dynamic has forced many life agents to modify their product mix or, in many cases, leave the business.
FAPCO’ s Life and Benefits division has three distinct areas of focus: group benefits, individual plans, and senior benefits. Group benefits refer to policies sold through the employment relationship, with the employer paying all or part of the premium. Voluntary benefits are also offered through the employer without the employer’ s financial participation, but they usually can be payroll deducted. Individual plans are customized and sold directly to the client, such as health, life insurance for family planning, school funding, estate planning, or business perpetuation.
Senior benefits are the third distinct category of focus. The baby boom generation has been turning 65 since 2010 and continues to reach age 65 at a fast pace— more than ten thousand per day on a national level. This creates a huge need for retirement products such as Medicare Supplements, Medicare drug plans, annuities— both fixed and indexed— and more. Indexed annuities are currently the preferred annuity due to the current low interest rate environment. These annuities allow for growth based on stock market growth while offering some guarantees as well, unlike a variable annuity. This departmental area has grown its product mix with both more carriers and greater product diversification to meet the growing need of seniors age 55 and over.
In the future, Max sees more growth in the area of retirement planning, with the continuing expansion of retiring baby boomers and new products to meet their needs for security and stability while accommodating moderate returns. +
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