Jack Gates

Jack Gates

Title: Vice President and Wealth Insurance Advisor, Rockland Trust

Age: 51

Experience: 29 years in insurance

As a senior vice president with Highland Capital Brokerage, insurance veteran Jack Gates first approached Rockland Trust intending to try to gain another client. But the more he spoke with Rockland, the more the two parties saw an opportunity to fill a void in the community bank’s investment management business. Rockland Trust would go on to hire Gates to lead the creation of a new in-house platform that provides advanced planning capabilities to business owners as well as providing life insurance and long-term care to retail clients, typically products that banks outsource. Gates, who was hired in January, says the new platform has lots of momentum and is proving to be a great way to solidify the bank’s vital relationships with its customers.

Q: What is your role within the investment management arm of Rockland Trust?

A: The Investment Management Group within Rockland manages $3.2 billion of client assets. Specifically, we manage money for company retirement plans, not for profit endowments, municipal funds and provide wealth management services to high net worth individuals. Many of our clients have existing relationships with our 86 branch locations as well as our commercial lenders and view Rockland Trust as a trusted advisor.

Bringing the insurance services was a piece that was missing. We do a great job of helping people and business owners with their living benefits of financial planning, estate planning and money management so the insurance component is a natural fit because now we are helping clients figure out what to do if something happens to them and they have to provide for a family or business partner. Do I have enough life insurance in place? What if I become disabled later in life? Is my disability insurance adequate? Are my assets going to be enough to support me and my surviving spouse if something were to happen to me?

Having these risk management tools to bring into the overall wealth management arena was an area that was lacking and I think is lacking in a lot of wealth management firms. It’s a great opportunity for our clients as well as for our internal referral sources.

One of the primary reasons Rockland Trust decided to build this capability internally was because the branch managers and commercial lenders were reluctant to outsource these services since their client relationships are sacred to them. Building it internally and having someone with experience they can trust, who lives in their community, really makes our commercial lenders and branch managers much more comfortable to bring me into the situation. We are getting great traction and positive feedback from both our internal folks as well as our bank customers. Most other banks either outsource these services or do not provide them at all.

Q: What are some changes that have occurred in the industry?

A: The big change is in mortality. People are living longer so many of the policies people purchased from 10 or 15 years ago are more expensive than life insurance today. In addition, with interest rates so low today, policies purchased over five to 10 years ago could be in trouble and may need to be re-evaluated to keep them in force. Because the general assets of the insurance industry are invested in fixed-income assets, the lower rates have affected the performance of existing insurance contracts.

There are also innovations that the insurance industry has created that have been very helpful. Long term care has been an enormous concern for clients at every level of wealth. Traditional long-term care policies are just too expensive and many insurance companies are not issuing them anymore.

One major innovation that I think is a game changer is that insurance agencies are bolting on a rider to the traditional policy that enables customers to pre-use the death benefit in a policy to pay for long-term care costs tax free. So now you have a life insurance product covering multiple contingencies. If a policy holder dies, the death benefit is there, but there is also a life insurance contract that will allow clients to use this death benefit to pay long-term health care costs if needed.

Q: How does it help a community bank to be able to offer life and disability insurance products in house?

A: The main benefit is it strengthens the benefits between Rockland Trust and its customers. If I have a customer who does their banking with us but not a whole lot else, the likelihood of that client leaving us is much greater than if they have two or three or four lines of business with us. If we can provide investment management services, then add some of the risk management pieces, these value-added services strengthen the client relationship. In addition to helping our clients secure their futures, providing insurance protects the bank on the commercial side.

For example, if we are loaning someone $10 million to fund a piece of their business, having an insurance policy in place will help ensure the continuity of the business should that business owner die. It’s incumbent on us to make sure we get that money back for our depositors, in addition to helping the business owner’s estate. Having insurance in place or some form of mechanism to pay that loan back protects our loans and it also provides a service that is needed for our clients.

There is a void of experienced, knowledgeable professional insurance agents in the market today so we believe providing this at Rockland Trust gives us an advantage over our competitors while providing a much-needed service to our clients.

Gates’ Five Insurance Tips For Commercial Real Estate:

  1.  Take the time necessary to review your plans every few years.
  2. The cost of ignoring the need is always more expensive than the cost of planning for the need.
  3. Liquidity exactly when you need it covers a lot of mistakes.
  4. There are a lot of sophisticated techniques, but try to go with the simple solutions first.
  5. A well-established relationship with a commercial lender can go a long way when chaos strikes.

Catering To The Client

by Bram Berkowitz time to read: 4 min
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