Managing general agency, Hub Financial, anticipates it will attract more business from advisors because of its new, simplified contracting process system.

"Hub Helps," is the name of the process designed to ease the burden of completing carrier contracting paperwork.

"Some of these forms can be pages and pages, so we centralized the contracting system for brokers," explains Terri DiFlorio, president of the company.

With the new system, advisors only have to fill out the application for the contract once online. Hub then fills in the paperwork, will schedule a brief phone interview to confirm the details, and then return the form to be signed.

She explains that before, advisors may not have transferred all their business to Hub to avoid the paperwork. But with the simplicity of the new system, she expects advisors to place all their contracts with Hub. "It will solidify business," Ms. DiFlorio predicts.

The system was developed internally, and is a first on the Canadian MGA scene. So far, advisor reaction is fantastic, states Ms. DiFlorio.

Corporate restructuring

Hub Financial has also recently made changes to its corporate structure to make life easier for advisors, says Ms. DiFlorio. It has created a new management team, bringing the life and investment sides under one administration.

"In the past, we had separate management structures, which was not beneficial to advisors," she explains.

With the new structure, John Lutrin is appointed to the position of executive vice-president and chief marketing officer for all of Hub Financial. In turn, all regional vice-presidents will report to him. Jeff Botosan will now assume the role of executive vice-president and chief operations officer. Mr. Botosan will now be responsible for finance, human resources, information technology and operations.

Other new positions include a national marketing coordinator, Melissa Sinopoli and a vice-president, operations, Jamie McGeachin.

In an internal memo Ms. DiFlorio writes, "The integration of our life and investment product administration teams is very exciting and will ultimately make this a better place for our brokers to do business. This will mean some process changes over the next few months as operations are integrated but for the time being, it's business as usual."

The goal of the integration, she says, is to "allow people to focus on what they are good at; to deliver full value to brokers and to achieve integration of the life and investment divisions."