NAIFA Chief Hopes for Closer Investment Firm Ties

Kevin Mayeux is in the middle of efforts to support the current Life Insurance Awareness Month campaign, and he would like to give future life awareness campaigns an even stronger voice.

Mayeux, the chief executive officer of the National Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors, is helping NAIFA combine with two other financial services organizations: the Society of Financial Service Professionals, which represents the holders of the chartered life underwriter designation and other designations, and Life Happens, which organizes life insurance and disability insurance awareness campaigns.

Mayeux said in a telephone interview last week that he’s excited about the return of the life awareness campaign. “We’re promoting the heck out of it,” he said.

In the future, he said, the combined organizations should be in an even better position to get things done.

What It Means

The financial services markets are changing, and so are financial services organizations.

The Combinations

Mayeux said the NAIFA combinations with FSP and Life Happens will create a group with a total of about 20,000 to 22,000 members.

NAIFA has already worked with FSP on the NAIFA-FSP Advanced Practice Center, which helps agents and financial advisors handle complex client cases.

About 25% of FSP members are also NAIFA members, Mayeux said.

NAIFA has also been supporting Life Happens since it was founded in the early 1990s.

COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic kept NAIFA from holding in-person events for about a year.

When the pandemic eased, in-person events were much more popular than before, Mayeux said.

Since then, he said, in-person attendance has cooled but remained strong, and the flow of new advisors has improved. About 200 to 300 new advisors are joining NAIFA each month.

The Future

Going forward, NAIFA plans to relaunch the Life Underwriter Training Council Fellow professional designation program, Mayeux said.

Both NAIFA and FSP work with investment firms as well as with life insurers, but FSP historically has had deeper ties to investment firms. A NAIFA-FSP combination “helps open the doors a bit more for us,” Mayeux said.

He likes the idea of talking about the relationship between life insurance and retirement planning. “I think they’re complementary,” he said. “Getting life insurance should be the very first step.”

Once people have life insurance, they can think about retirement planning, he said.

Kevin Mayeux. Credit: NAIFA