The Financial Services Council (FSC) says it has developed templates for a number of products such as life insurance and income protection to help members prepare for design and distribution laws that will take effect on October 5.

Work on the templates for target market determinations (TMDs) and also for industry data standards started 18 months ago, in collaboration with members from the life insurance, funds management and superannuation industries, FSC said in a statement.

The design and distribution regime makes it mandatory for financial product issuers to ensure their offerings are designed the meet the needs of defined targets and are distributed appropriately.

Implementation of the new laws - one of many reform proposals made by the Hayne royal commission - were deferred by six months because of the pandemic disruption.

“Our templates and standards should make life much easier for product issuers, platforms and financial advisers who would otherwise face confusing and inconsistent compliance requirements,” FSC CEO Sally Loane said.

“Without this alignment, advisers in particular will be faced with having to comply with dozens of different templates. That would be simply unworkable.”

FSC had announced in April it was developing the templates and last week’s update builds further on what it has achieved since then.

Templates are now available for retail life insurance products, trauma insurance, total and permanent disability, income protection and other financial offerings.

FSC says the data standards it developed relates to key information that needs to be shared between product issues and distributors, such as data on complaints and sales outside target markets.

Click here for the templates: