This is the last post in the series recounting the great discussion from our March Protection Forum, focusing on how insurers can better communicate with advisers.
We’ve actually seen a huge rise in protection sales in the past year. The message has been going out on social media, and there’s never been a better time to show people the importance of protection, and knowing that their products are actually helping them.
Kieron Hogg:
It’s just that we’re seeing pretty much the opposite of what just been said, that we found that over the last 12 months we’ve seen a hundred and seventy five percent increase in protection products being put in place. Kind of what you touched on, that idea of getting the message out there in various ways, using things like TikTok, using LinkedIn, using referral process via Facebook and so on.
For us, it’s never been a better time to get protection in place. And I think our clients are aware of that as well. It’s at the forefront of their minds, you know, to come and hopefully at the massive pandemic. Why wouldn’t you be thinking about, “let’s have a look at that £1500 direct debit that’s coming out of my account and actually get some expert advice on that.” And that’s what we do. There are so many clients that we come across paying a considerable amount of their salary every month and they haven’t got a clue what they’re paying for.
When you ask them quite often it’s a case of, “well, it just seemed like a good number to have, for example, a middle level term policy that I haven’t had thorough bespoke advice.” So for us, it’s a massive opportunity between the last 12 months and we’ve seen huge growth.
One of the issues is having too many layers, and not getting enough up-to-date information from providers.
Michelle Lawson:
Yes, I don’t think we need to complicate it too much. I think one of the biggest problems is having too many layers. And I think it’s important that we have that one point because otherwise it’s going to detract from the cost element. I think one of the biggest things that we do see is that when there’s live tracking on insurer websites not always being bang up to date and trying to get information is tough sometimes, especially probably more so in the last 12 months than it ever has been before.
And I think it’s also that restriction, trying to find that information as well. And it’s a very, very closed book. And I find that insurers could actually liaise a little bit more with us to give us a bit more information. I understand from the protection point of view that GDPR has got to be in place but then we’ve put the application into the insurance company for the client, they obviously want us to have that personal information as we have also gone through the medical underwriting ourselves. We’ve already had that very detailed conversation with that client.
A large annoyance for us is not being able to track the process of an application, and it’s a huge time drainer for us trying o get the updates.
Kieron Hogg:
Just on the back of what Michelle’s said, for us as a massive bugbear in not being able to track the process of an application, certain providers have got it better than others. But it’s a huge time drainer for us if someone’s going to go into medical underwriting, that we then have to constantly be picking up the phone to check where the progress of applications are when we could actually be spending time with more clients. You know, you could be sat on the phone for half an hour or something, waiting to get through to an underwriter to see if the GP reports even been issued. So I can’t come up with a solution for it, but I just think there’s a massive variation in the level of information that’s provided to us as advisers.
It would be nice to be able to see the insurer’s notes to see where they’ve chased so we can base what we do off of that. If the reports take too long to come back, the customer will leave without protection.
Michelle Lawson:
I can’t understand why we can’t actually see insurer’s notes, because it would be useful to actually see that they phoned the GP surgery regularly chasing. If we’re seeing that they’re not getting any response from the GP surgery, then we know then that we can actually phone and also chase. Equally, I also think that there needs to be a massive overhaul because I think even with GP reports there needs to be an SLA turnaround for these GPs to actually get these reports out.
I had one last year, it took six months for the GP to send the report back and they just kept hiding behind the fact that they were busy. We appreciate this but got some somebody wanting protection, you don’t want them to go off the boil while they’re waiting for the GP report to come back because you don’t want the customer to not proceed due to it being too much hassle and then leave without protection. They’ve got that protection gap then, which also isn’t fair.
I think the BMA are happy to help get things sorted out, and when the funds do go out people will sometimes go private which alleviates NHS pressure.
Michelle Lawson:
Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. I think something needs to be done with for exactly that reason. And I think that there is a call for this and we don’t want to leave our people unprotected by any shadow of a doubt. But you’ve just highlighted that case, which could happen. And that’s not going to be an isolated case. You know, that’s not going to be first and it’s certainly not going to be the last.
And I think if the BMA are quite happy to sort of look at doing something that can actually get that turned around and everyone should be as important as each other. Because if in the event that the funds do pay out, there’s every chance that somebody might actually go private to have any treatment and stuff done on, for example, a critical illness policy, which would then alleviate any pressure on the NHS as well. So it’s a kind of a multifaceted solution, really, but it just doesn’t come across.
We don’t want tons of GP reports because we don’t have the underwriters to deal with that. We tend to ask for targeted reports, and for 80% of cases we don’t ask for them at all. iGPRs have seen an uptake in COVID which is great, but there is still an issue getting the medical professionals to use them.
Peter Hamilton:
Just reflecting on the last two points that the both of you have made there. I can understand at one level the potential desirability, but with just one word of caution. As insurers, we have a finite number of underwriters. We don’t want GP reports if we can possibly avoid them, because that just takes up time. We want to reduce the number of GP reports we have to go through rather than increase them, for everyone’s sake.
We tend to ask for targeted reports. We don’t necessarily want to read 200 pages worth of notes because that will take up a lot of time and slow the decision for our IFA colleagues and customers. So overall, the direction of travel, I think, ought to be to reduce the number of GP reports we get. And if we start to encourage people just to get them automatically, candidly, there’s a real chance we could clog up the system because we don’t get GP reports in something like 80 percent of cases today.
If we suddenly got all those, the system would collapse, simplistically. So I think the points made about iGPRs are absolutely the right ones. We do need to encourage that. And I think actually Covid has seen an increase in take-up. But there are challenges, as Ian says, in terms of getting the medical profession to adopt them. I think as much as anything else, they’ve just got other things to worry about. And working out how to use new systems just doesn’t tend to be top of that list.
But we do collectively and individually as firms as the ABI and I think with the support of advisers look to help them to understand the benefits of using. It’s easier. There are data protection benefits to them, to using iGPRs and more. So I think iGPRs are good. Automatic request of your full medical records to be sent to insurers can be less good, because I think that that could well just sink the system if we were to get one hundred percent iGPRs in every case, because we just don’t have enough underwriters to look at them (and with e GPRs we need to target the information sought).
We send out details of every claim and inform the advisers. There’s been much more use of technology this past year which has accelerated things. We give customers a choice of how they’d like to be contacted by us. The claims process has been developed a lot this year.
Peter Hamilton:
I think on Roy’s point, we absolutely do want to inform advisers and we do. So we send out details of every claim. I don’t believe there are many where a customer would come back and say, “I don’t want the adviser involved.” If they did, we would have to honour that. And I think that formally and expressly recognised in the PDG charter, which we’ve signed up to.
I guess if you looked at what’s changed, there has been more and more use of technology specifically and this actually accelerated over the last year. So with things like getting death certificates, originally we had to get authenticated originals. We don’t have to do that now. I think just making the most of all of these relaxations, not least on part of the government in terms of what we can and can’t accept is a good example right now in terms of how we accelerate the claims process.
We give customers a choice in terms of how they want to be informed on a regular basis, which may be texting them or phoning them on a regular basis. My sense is that actually of all the areas we’ve discussed today, the claims process is one of the better developed. That’s not to say it can’t be improved further, but I’m less conscious of glaring things that we need to improve specifically there, but we are absolutely ready to reflect if others think that’s not the case.
I think collectively and individually, we will have done a lot on that claims process in the last year specifically, so I would hope there aren’t many advisers feeling that insurers aren’t keeping them aware of when claims are made and what they’re for.
I think insurers increasing the use of apps to receive information from images.
Rob Harvey:
I think that in the long run what would be ideal is where you’ve got policy holders who have got those smartphone applications. And I think increasingly that that’s the way that things are going in terms of how people interact to financial products so that you’ve absolutely got the functionality built into that to submit claims and submit evidence. You know, there’s no reason really why we can’t have a situation in which, using the example of Steve Casey, a smartphone image of that letter uploaded onto an app that’s able to facilitate the notification of a claim doesn’t seem to me like something that’s particularly far-fetched or unachievable. So absolutely. I think I think insurers enhancing the sort of smartphone application offering is something that I think should happen. Absolutely.
