Tower Limited has announced a strategic partnership with Finsure, one of the Asia-Pacific region’s prominent mortgage aggregation groups, aimed at streamlining the insurance referral process for New Zealand-based advisers and their clients.
Through this partnership, Finsure NZ advisers will gain access to Tower’s referral model, which delegates the management of insurance quotes entirely to a specialist Tower team. This approach is intended to reduce administrative complexities for advisers while improving the customer experience.
Jonathan Beale (pictured), Tower’s managing director of partnerships, emphasised the value of this collaboration.
“This partnership reinforces our commitment to offer Kiwi forward thinking insurance products and services and simple and rewarding customer experiences; it’s great that Finsure NZ’s advisers and their customers will now benefit from these offerings too,” he said.
Jenny Campbell, country manager for Finsure New Zealand, said the partnership would broaden the scope of insurance solutions available to their advisers and clients.
“Our partnership with Tower opens the doors to new, high-quality insurance products and services that will benefit our advisers and their clients alike,” she said.
This partnership builds on an existing relationship between Finsure, Tower, and Vega Mortgages, a financial advisory firm providing a range of solutions to New Zealand customers.
Vega group CEO Harry Ferreira described the partnership as reflective of Finsure’s growing presence in the local mortgage market.
“By working together with Tower, Finsure is only set to increase their reach further across the country, delivering simple and effective mortgage services to even more Kiwi,” he said.
The partnership follows a period of significant growth for Tower’s adviser network, which expanded by 32% in FY24 to 3,300 advisers. The company also reported a 19% increase in new policies sold via adviser referrals compared to the previous financial year.
For the financial year ending Sep. 30, 2024, Tower reported an underlying net profit after tax (NPAT) of $83.5 million. The insurer credited the result to premium growth, operational improvements, and reduced weather-related claims compared to the previous year.
The company’s reported profit was $74.3 million, a significant improvement from the $1 million loss recorded in FY23, when catastrophic weather events had a major financial impact. Gross written premium (GWP) grew by 15% year-on-year to $595 million, while the business-as-usual claims ratio improved to 48.1%, down from 55.1% in FY23.
Tower also achieved efficiencies in its management expense ratio (MER), which fell to 31.4% from 32% in the prior year. The financial year saw no major weather events, reducing large event costs to negative $2.3 million, a marked improvement from $55.6 million the previous year.