In the spring of 2010, PPI Financial purchased a 50% stake in Financial Management, a large western-Canada based managing general agency. PPI Solutions, the company that evolved from that deal, is now looking to grow.

Jim Virtue, president and CEO of PPI Solutions, says the company is in negotiations with a view to making acquisitions. “We’re engaged in some conversations right now. We want to continue to expand with a focus on expanding in central Canada.”

Bound by confidentiality agreements, he cannot provide more details on these negotiations at the moment, except to say Ontario is a market of particular interest. “We’re very strong in Western Canada, very strong in Atlantic Canada and we see that Central Canada is where our main growth opportunities are…The roots of our company really are in the Calgary market and the Atlantic Canada market.

Mr. Virtue adds that PPI Solutions presently has a good-sized office in Toronto, but the company is looking to enlarge its footprint in the province generally.

Since the merger, PPI has been renamed PPI Advisory and it serves the high-end and ultra high-end of the market place. PPI Solutions serves the broader marketplace and has in excess of 2000 active advisors, says Mr. Virtue.

Organic growth

He says that while he is very interested in growing PPI Solution’s network through acquisitions, organic growth also remains a priority. “We’re very pleased so far this year with the level of organic growth we’ve been able to achieve. The organic growth is greater than 10%.”

Mr. Virtue says this organic growth is due to both increased advisor recruitment and rising productivity among existing brokers. The resources that the company has gained through its relationship with PPI Advisory, such as sales concepts and marketing tools, account for this improved productivity, he explains.

“What PPI has allowed us to do is provide way better support to our advisors. We’ve developed our PPI Solutions toolkit which is an online marketing tool to assist advisors in dealing more efficiently and more compliantly with their contracts. We’ve developed a series of client-focused video marketing campaigns, again all centred around helping our advisors do a better job of marketing their products and running their practices.”

Productivity growth

Mr. Virtue says the advisors who are taking advantage of these resources are seeing their businesses grow by 20 to 30 per cent and are operating their practices more efficiently.

An example of these resources is a concept called Life Insurance Funding Options. This is a sales presentation that an advisor can show to a client to explain the true cost from a discounted cash flow point of view of purchasing a term product or a permanent insurance product.

Concepts such as this were originally developed for PPI Advisory’s high-end clients, but they can be transferred easily to a mid-market clientele, says Mr. Virtue. “Whether you’re selling someone a $100 million dollar policy or a million dollar policy, those concepts are exactly the same.”

Strategic alliances

The company has also expanded its distribution by forming alliances with Richardson GMP and with IPG Insurance of Ottawa. “We’ve entered into new distribution arrangements that have expanded our footprint, expanded the amount of business we write.”

PPI Solutions is still assessing the Quebec market place, says Mr. Virtue. Since its deal with PPI, it has opened an office in Montreal, but this office acts as a support to PPI Advisory advisors. “We’re not in the general brokerage market place yet. We’re still trying to decide if that’s something we’re interested in.”