Life Insurance Advisors: directory of firms

A life insurance licence is a separate authorisation, not an extension of a general insurance one. In Ontario, an individual who wants to be licensed as a life or accident and sickness agent must complete a training program approved by the Canadian Insurance Services Regulatory Organizations and by the Chief Executive Officer of the Financial Services Regulatory Authority of Ontario, which is the Life Licence Qualification Program. The harmonised program covers life insurance, accident and sickness insurance, segregated funds and annuities, and ethics and professional practice, and course providers are accredited nationally before being approved provincially.

The licence is still provincial. The Insurance Council of British Columbia licenses life and accident and sickness agents and publishes their status and class in its Insurance Licensee Directory; the Alberta Insurance Council issues life and accident and sickness licences for agents representing an agency, sole proprietors and employees of an insurance company; and the Autorité des marchés financiers keeps Quebec's registers. When someone is licensed in one province and you live in another, ask which authorisation covers the advice you are receiving.

One more boundary is worth stating plainly. A life licence authorises insurance business. It does not by itself authorise securities business, and the fact that an advisor may sell a segregated fund contract does not mean the same person is registered to advise on stocks, bonds or mutual funds.

Segregated funds are insurance contracts. The Nova Scotia Securities Commission explains that a segregated fund is a defined variable annuity contract that can be sold only by a licensed insurance representative, that investors are not issued units or shares but instead receive and sign a segregated fund contract, and that segregated funds do not fall under the jurisdiction of securities regulators and are instead regulated by provincial insurance regulators.

That is why the registration question matters. The same regulator notes that someone dealing only in segregated funds does not require registration with a securities regulator, while a person who also sells mutual funds or bonds would need to be registered on the securities side as well. Many advisors hold both, and many hold only one. The question to ask is not whether someone can help with investments in general terms, but which of the two authorisations they actually hold, and therefore which products they are permitted to advise on and which regulator oversees that advice.

Keep the boundary in view when a conversation moves from protecting a family to building or drawing down savings. Insurance licensing and securities registration exist under different rules with different complaint routes, and the honest answer to a question outside an advisor's authorisation is a referral to someone who holds it, not an opinion offered anyway.

Life insurance is bought for a set of circumstances and then outlived by them. A mortgage taken on, a business started, a child born, a separation, a dependant with long-term needs, a term policy approaching the end of its period: each is a reason to look again at both the amount of coverage and who is named to receive it. Beneficiary designations in particular tend to be set once and forgotten, and the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada's note that a revocable beneficiary can be changed at any time without telling them is a reminder that the designation, not an intention or a will's assumption, is what the insurer acts on.

Keep a short record: the insurer, the policy number, the type and term of the contract, the beneficiary and where the paperwork is kept. Tell the person who would have to deal with it that it exists. A policy nobody can find is a problem that no amount of coverage solves.