Aviva & Holloway Friendly make interesting announcements
Notable events this week included Aviva to provide extra support for cancer suffers with Macmillan. It’s always good to see an insurer put in place additional resources to help customers when they need it most i.e. when making claim, after all this is really what insurance is about. This is the latest of many such steps Aviva have taken and again should be applauded.
Also this week Holloway launched their revised one2protect plan . Our analysis highlights key technical details that were omitted from media coverage that we believe any adviser planning to recommend this product would want to understand.
The Holloway tell us that in bringing this product to market they are aiming to offer choice to distributors and simpler options for some customers. This may be, but we have concerns over the renewable nature of elements of the cover and they have withdrawn some features we believe advisers and consumers value. Holloway say that these were not being used. Given the extensive feedback at our last Protection Forum, suggesting such features are exactly what advisers are looking for we wonder if perhaps the company should have done more to highlight them.
As a substantial part of the next Protection Forum is dedicated to “What do we need to do to make Income Protection even more relevant in 2021?” I expect the new Holloway product and its merits may be debated at some length. If you have not already signed up to join our March Forum you can do so from this link.
As always, we looked at a range of subjects to give advisers easy access to detailed objective analysis of different insurance product features. This week we covered:
Waived deferred periods for linked income protection claims how insurers compare and
Waiver of premium how insurers compare?
Being Friday, today Steve Berry produced the latest of our Everything You Need to Know summaries this time looking at Making Changes to Critical Illness plans. This considers:
How Flexible Should Children’s Critical Illness cover be?
When can life cover be increased without underwriting?
How flexible are protection plans for renters?
The benefits of buyback options
Who helps advisers introduce critical illness cover to young people?
If you haven’t done so already remember to book your free tickets to join the #LifeSearchAwards2021. To attend please email [email protected] who will organise your ticket. Please feel free to pass this on to any colleagues as the event really will be the more the merrier.
Over at Benefits Guru Jason Green continued his look at What makes a good workplace pension part two and if you missed part one last week you can find that here. Later in the week Jason also produced a great summary on Understanding Workplace Pension Providers service-standards.
Finally, for those of you interested in wealth planning 7IM have produced the best user interface I have ever seen for a financial planning app with the latest version of the 7IMagine software. Over at our AdviserSoftware.com site I have shared my thoughts on why this is such a good service and also how it can be improved further. If you are interested in what best in class looks like it’s well worth giving my review a read.
Have a great weekend everybody.
All the best
Ian
