Another ex-AIA exec starts new advice business

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Anna Schubert, formerly the head of IFA and Group at AIA NZ has started her own advice business - the second former AIA head to strike out on their own this year.

Monday, September 22nd 2025, 6:08AM 3 Comments

by Ksenia Stepanova

Schubert’s previous role dealt with advisers in risk, home loans and corporate solutions. She is now director/financial adviser at Lead Your Life, which focuses on insurance, wealth creation, estate planning and wellbeing.

“I had been working with advisers for 29 years, supporting them in their starting journey and helping them grow,” Schubert told Good Returns. “I’ve always sat on the other side saying, “One day I will.” That day started this year!”

Schubert is carving out a niche in ‘holistic’ advice, and wellbeing is one of the core areas of the business. She says that in client conversations, it quickly emerges that many people are not doing okay. Financial wellbeing is a key part, but she also works with wellbeing-focused referral partners - AIA Vitality being one.

Schubert recently attended a Retirement Commissioner presentation, where it was estimated that around 20 hours a week is lost on money worries per person. There’s also a significant knowledge gap when it comes to insurance and other financial products.

“One of the most common things people say to me is that their insurance premiums have gone up, and they don’t know what to do,” Schubert said.

“You have to educate them on what the products are actually designed to do, and go through the levers that they have on their current product. So many people have products that they don’t actually understand. This industry as a whole needs to educate on that before doing anything else.”

She says the idea is to take the medicine protocol - first, do no harm. That means looking at how to make existing products more affordable before thinking about moving a client, even if that doesn’t result in benefit to the adviser.

“It is interesting to step back and think about whether the industry is shaped in a way that supports that type of approach,” she says.

Going from insurer to adviser

Schubert says that one of the things she’s been surprised by is the amount of manual processes still left in the insurance industry. In her experience, it’s 80-20 - 80% do it seamlessly, but 20% of low-demand or low-volume processes still rely on paper and wet signatures.

She says that the customer experience doesn’t end up being great in these instances, and results in a lot of explaining from the adviser side.

“A few companies have now found that I’m giving them continuous improvement process mapping of where all the friction points are and how they can be removed,” she says.

“We don’t make it easy when everyone’s expectations are electronic, and there are so many manual paper processes. It’s that remaining 20% that’s the pebble in the shoe.”

Looking ahead, Schubert says she’s still in the process of getting to grips with client acquisition. She’s started without a client base - partly out of wanting to have the ‘real experience’, but partly because existing client bases tend to recycle the same clients between companies.

“In a way, I’m doing an experiment to see what it takes to actually move the needle and get people to be really clear about what they need to plan and control, rather than eventually having to start a Give a Little page because things didn’t get sorted,” Schubert says.

“I want to build a client base through education. That takes understanding what people need to hear in order to be in the position where they want to say yes.

“But overall I’ve been having to get curious, sit with a lot of advisers in their offices, watch them for a day, etc. Everything is different to what you think you know in a corporate environment. It’s a lot!”

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