The Isle of Man based company offers a range of tax efficient investment products within a life assurance policy wrapper designed to appeal to affluent international investors, and sells its policies exclusively through a network of independent financial advisers and the retail operations of certain financial institutions.
“Over the past 12 months since we launched our turnaround strategy we have added 53 brand new distribution agreements,” said Hansard’s global sales and marketing director Graham Morrall.
Morrall said that in south-east Asia, where the company had signed 10 new relationships predominantly in Malaysia, one was with a retail bank and all would focus on distributing its Labuan-licensed products.
Across north Asia, Hansard has added 12 new relationships with the new brokers focused mainly on servicing Chinese customers though these would not be based in mainland China.
However, Hansard still lacks a presence in Japan where the termination of a lucrative distribution agreement in October 2013 caused it to incur a significant loss of premium income. In fact for the six months to December 31 last year, Hansard’s overall new business sales were down nearly 50% on the previous period due to the loss of that Japanese operation.
It’s in the Middle East and Africa where the company has seriously stepped up its distribution network, adding 15 new relationships. Morrall said the new distribution deals in the region was already paying dividends with an increase in sales seen for the three months to the end of December compared to the previous three months.
The bulk of the remaining new relationships signed were with European brokers, some with links to the Middle East. While the company has also maintained four relationships with brokers in Latin America.
“We anticipate that these new relationships will begin to deliver increased levels of profitable new business, and diversify our exposure across a range of distributors and countries, in the second half of the financial year and beyond.” said Gordon Marr, Hansard’s group chief executive officer.
Hansard Global, which has its international life assurance company, Hansard International, based in the Isle of Man, has faced a number of significant obstacles in recent years. In addition to the loss of its Japanese distributor in 2013, the company was also forced to settle a litigation case in Norway for €1.5m (£1m).
Also in 2013 the company also quietly stopped accepting new business into its Dublin domiciled European business, Hansard Europe, having decided that it was in the “long term interests of the group” to reduce exposure to the region. The company confirmed in its latest results that writs totalling £5.4m remained outstanding in relation to litigation against Hansard Europe.
