What happened in a hot week for protection?
We began the week at Protection Guru with a further instalment of feedback from advisers at our recent forums responding to the question “What is the future for Life Insurance Advice?” This features great observations and views from Emma Astley, Mathew Chapman, Harvey Kambo, Zanele Sibanda, Christine Newell, Alan Knowles, and David Mead.
On Tuesday we explored How is relevant life-cover becoming more relevant? In her piece Amanda Newman Smith highlighted a range of different strengths from various insurers so if you are going to write some relevant life cover this should be a really valuable read.
Wednesday we launched a page to showcase all LV= are doing to help families maintain their income. The same day Legal & General launched dedicated tools to help advisers offer protection cover to renters. There has been great feedback from adviser on both of these.
On Thursday we looked at Weighing up value added fitness services – fascinating to see how many insurers approach these issues in different ways, again well worth a read if you have clients with a special interest in this area or for those who, like me, need to lose a few pounds! We ended the week with the latest in our everything you need to know series, this time looking at Value Added Services. The objective of these is really to help build comprehensive analysis which firms can use as part of their learning and development processes.
One of the best conferences I went to last year was the LIMRA life insurance conference in the US, there are a few upsides to COVID-19 but one is that many events around the world are turning digital which makes them more accessible to a wider audience. This year LIMRA are running a virtual event, the agenda is well worth a read.
My moment of the week must be a big thank you to Roy McLoughlin and Kevin Carr. It was announced this week they will be standing down as the joint chairs of the Income Protection Task Force at the end of the year. Both Roy and Kevin have made a massive contribution, not only in the last three years where they have led the group, but also for many years before. They leave Income Protection in a far better position than it was when they took over with business volumes having nearly doubled. Income Protection is no longer the poor relation of the Protection family, on the contrary it’s increasingly recognised as the jewel in the crown of financial resilience, the contract that really keeps families together in difficult times.
The purpose of a Task Force is usually to come in and make a big difference in a short time, so that an industry, suitably refreshed, can then move on to different ways of doing things. There is no doubt that Roy and Kevin have achieved that objective. A pair of “Lifetime Achievement” awards next year look inevitable and well deserved. Both are already moving on to new things, Kevin obviously continues to lead his own PR practice and Roy has been running an excellent series of podcasts on Protection, which really must be listened to; you can find them here https://iptf.co.uk/podcasts/
I’m seeing more and more insurers producing their own initiatives to support income protection, such as the two examples mentioned above, as well as a growing number of advisers like Matthew Chapman, Karla Edwards and Lee Flanagan to name just three who are producing their own clear, concise content to encourage consumers to embrace income protection and financial resilience generally. It’s great that the industry has now moved on to be more self-supportive in this way.
So, I am off on holiday for a week subject to getting a clear result on my COVID-19 test from yesterday. Frankly, I have had a rubbish customer experience with a clinic in Harley Street getting this done, so a free idea for insurers; I suggest you use some of your buying power to negotiate a good deal on PRC tests with a reliable service level. I think that would be a very popular value-added benefit right now.
