Canadian bank using reverse mortgages to bail out policyholders
You have to tip your hat to our fellow reverse mortgage professionals up north. Canada’s HomeEquity Bank is leveraging its CHIP Reverse Mortgage (once called the Canadian Home Income Plan) to help retirees strengthen their insurance strategies. But whoa…wait a minute. Aren’t lenders prohibited from cross-selling both reverse mortgages and insurance products much less ever slightly brushing up against the subject? Well, yes. Certainly for U.S. lenders and originators.
But back to our story from a recent column, we came across on the website Wealth Professional- Canada. It says the bank has come upon a specific strategy that was born from the analysis of insurance agent inquiries received by the bank’s wealth management division. And what they found is certainly not unique to Canadians. The wealth division was contacted by several insurance professionals who had well-established agencies; each with hundreds of previous and current policyholders. In life insurance parlance this is called a ‘book of business’.
