Dear NAIFA Members,
Welcome to 2011! I hope each of you enjoyed a wonderful and memorable holiday season with family and friends.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for supporting NAIFA over the past year, and special thanks to our NAIFA volunteer leaders for your quality and dedicated service to NAIFA. Our members’ commitment to our profession, our clients, and our association is a great source of inspiration and makes me extremely proud and honored to serve as your president.
I’d also like to provide you with a brief overview of some of the ways in which our NAIFA Board has been working with our national, state, and local volunteer leaders and professional staff to protect your business and the essential role of our industry, in serving the financial security needs of 75 million American families who depend upon us.
In December a NAIFA contingent of myself as President, President-elect Robert Miller and members of NAIFA’s Government Relations team met with all five SEC commissioners, including Chairman Mary Shapiro and her staff. We shared with the commissioners the results of recent surveys showing that NAIFA members fulfill a valuable role in providing needed financial services, products, and incidental advice for the vastly underserved middle market. We also discussed how added regulatory burdens, and particularly a mandated and imposed fiduciary standard of care, may threaten the business models of NAIFA members and hurt this core client base of middle-income investors. We intend to continue our dialog with them as the Commission continues its work to strengthen investor protection regulations.
We also were able to speak with several reporters during our trip to Washington DC in an ongoing effort to spread NAIFA’s message.
- I interviewed with Reuters for a story on our meetings with the SEC and the results of the NAIFA member and consumer surveys commissioned through LIMRA.
- I told InvestmentNews that NAIFA is working to ensure that an imposed fiduciary standard doesn’t undermine our members’ ability to continue serving our middle-income clients and disenfranchise this market segment from access to financial services and products.
- I sat for interviews with reporters from Bloomberg, Dow Jones Newswire, National Underwriter and InsuranceNewsNet to brief them on the fiduciary issue and other items on our agenda, including health care reform implementation, upcoming income tax reform (commenting on the Deficit Reduction Commission Report), and the new estate tax system rules.
- Finally, I had the unique experience of being interviewed on a segment on the new estate tax rules on Fox Business News' "Varney & Co."
But this was not an ending—it was plain and simple just a starting point. We face numerous challenges in the coming year, but you can count on NAIFA’s leadership, professional staff, and myself to be unrelenting and unwavering, as we continue to work on your behalf – to keep you in business, to help you grow your business, and to promote the ethical business practices of our members.
On behalf of the NAIFA Board, our officers, our NAIFA professional staff, and our national volunteer leadership, I want to thank you for your vote of confidence, active involvement, and level of commitment to our association and our profession—together, we will write the next chapter in NAIFA’s rich history—thanks again for doing your part. I wish you every success great health, happiness, and prosperity in the coming year and beyond.
Warmest regards,
Terry K. Headley, LUTCF, LIC, FSS
NAIFA President