This is the third post in our series looking at the great discussions from our November Protection Forum. In this section, attendees discussed what information clients want from insurers and how technology can improve communication.

People tend to look at price first, and we’ve definitely consolidated the information we give to clients but it definitely boils down to people thinking the value is right.

Pendragon Protect website

Adam Kaplan:

The core things, and I always relate this back to when I do my car insurance or my bike insurance, is ultimately people are looking at the price. When we first started, we used to have too much information. And what I found is less is more and we kind of over the years have boiled it down because ultimately, when I get my car insurance quote, as soon as that information comes to me, the first thing I want to do is check the price that they’re telling me is the right price.

And I guess it’s the same with the anniversary statements. When we get our renewals coming through, all we’re looking at is checking the price: has it gone up a ridiculous amount? The great thing about what we do, certainly with inflation, there’s only a small increase, so people never, ever question that. But ultimately, I always go in at: when you take your income protection, you chose to have it index linked, these are the benefits of why, here’s your current price, this is what it’s going to be. And then I’ll go into the extra nice benefits like the added value benefits and stuff like that. But ultimately, in my opinion, it all boils down to what people are paying. Because if they feel they’re paying too much, either cancel it or go and review it somewhere else.

My view is that the adviser is best placed to manage the annual reviews if it was an advised sale. When I was advising I always wanted some way to get the data from providers into my CRM so I could compile the information easier. Another question I have is whether we’re positioning the statements better to clients, maybe by checking which added value services they’ve used in the past year, or reminding them of the remote GP service they have.

Rob Harvey: I think partly my view… Where the client has a relationship with an adviser, it was an advised sale, they bought it through an intermediary. You know, it seems to me as though the adviser is probably best placed to manage that relationship throughout the duration of the policy and therefore manage those annual reviews. So I just remember back to when I was advising, what I– and this is maybe sort of slightly pie in the sky idea that’s just never going to happen– but what I wanted almost was some way in which I could get that data from the insurer into my CRM. So I didn’t have to faff around with letters and emails going backwards and forwards, but just simply getting the data on the up to date information on that product into my CRM, so that I could position the anniversary discussion with the client in whichever way I deemed appropriate. And I think what’s interesting here is that I guess at the moment, insurers are sending a letter to people saying, “you’re currently insured for X amount of money on X term,” but actually, is there a way in which particularly advisers, but even insurers should actually be positioning that differently to those clients? And rather than going in on, “this is what you’re covered for if you die or you get ill, etcetera, actually, is there a different way of positioning that with people, particularly if there’s a concern that it’s going to lead to cancellations if we’re contacting people and reminding them of their cover? Actually, are we as an industry, as a whole, are we positioning that correctly with the client? Is there actually a better way of contacting people and saying “you have this cover in place at this point in time? Here’s what you’re insured for.” I think there’s potentially and I don’t have the ideas off the top of my head, but there is potentially a different way. For example, I know when I would contact people when I was advising, the anniversary conversation would certainly remind them of the core benefits. But a big part of that discussion was “did you use any of the added value services you had in the last year? If you didn’t, here’s a reminder of what you’ve got access to.” At this point in time when advising I might be contacting people saying, “coming up to a year, you’ve got a protection policy that’s got access to GP services you’ve probably seen in the news lately that it’s hard to get ahold of an NHS GP, just to remind you you’ve got that.” I don’t know if I’d necessarily go in and say to somebody, “just to remind you you’ve got half a million quid of life cover if you drop down dead tomorrow.” So I think there’s potentially a different way in which we can position some of this for people when it comes to these annual statements and reviews.

I don’t think clients are cancelling policies because of annual statements. I think it would be good if we could link the statements to client life events, points for natural reviews rather than just annually. To have the information in a CRM would be great but I think it would be difficult to do.

Matt Brown:

So annual statements are a subject close to my heart, absolutely keen to develop further. I would say to the point about driving cancellations that I just don’t buy it, to be honest. It’s not something that bothers me or holds back development at all. I think if customers are going to cut [their cover] off the back of receiving that type of correspondence, we’ve probably lost them anyway. So that doesn’t figure in in calculations.

I think for me, it’s where we provide them as well that is really important. I would want to provide those statements to advisers because I think they can set the context better and that just is a natural fit. So if we can link it to client events, all the better– where clients have changed jobs and changed addresses, potentially going through marriages, separations, all that type of stuff. All points for natural reviews rather than forced annual reviews. I think that would be a really good starting point as well.

And to Poppy’s point around CRM systems and as my last point,  it’s a great idea, I think, to push that information into adviser CRM systems but it’s difficult to do. I think if there one CRM system out there, that would make it a hell of a lot easier. But in my experience, there’s pretty much a one-to-one relationship between CRM systems and different adviser firms, which doesn’t make it impossible, but just makes it a little bit more difficult.

The anniversary statements are typically driven by policy anniversary so the client will have all different dates for each policy they have. Having the data available for the adviser to compile at the time that makes the most sense for the client would be great and ideally we’d use open finance to combine the data from different insurers into one template. So I would almost leapfrog the discussion on annual statements to just making the data available through open finance.

Zurich website

Peter Hamilton:

I just have one other point there, just reflecting on the whole nature of the first half of this session, because we started off with open banking and statements, and in a way, I wonder whether annual statements is the right phraseology. Inasmuch as they’re driven today by policy anniversary, typically, so we’ll have one on one date, someone from Guardian or Aviva or whoever might have one on another date.

I suspect one of the business uses or business cases from open finance may well be the sharing of the data from all insurers that doesn’t rely necessarily on us producing a statement because that then has to be compiled somehow at a different time with somebody else’s. But the data available at any particular time when the adviser thinks it’s the right time to produce that annual report, because right now you might get one from us in November and you might be doing your review in July.

Ideally, we’d use open finance to say, “We’ve got this data, it will come out of our system and somebody else’s system,” and it will then go into a template like Adam’s got there where you present not just one insurer’s piece, but a kind of combination of all of them. So in terms of where we get to, I suspect it’s almost leapfrogging everyone has annual statements because they don’t today and suspect it may be a while before they all do.

But could we use open finance to get to a stage where the data is there? Someone somewhere will commercially work out a way to kind of bring that data together and present it attractively from all insurers, not just individual ones that are somehow then cobbled together.

I think the challenge of feeding the data into CRMs is complex but we have the advantage of learning from the wealth industry and how much CRMs have improved in terms of getting these integrations running.

Poppy Achilles: Peter, just as you were talking, I had put a note in the chat “if open finance puts a customer in control of their data, does the concept of annual statements become an outdated model?” And then you started talking. So I think you and I have landed through osmosis on the same concept there. But I do, and I take the challenge earlier about the concept of feeding data into CRMs is a complex one. When I joined FTRC 20 years ago, I spent the first five years of my life here working with insurers and advisers in terms of implementing the messaging standards for valuations for pensions and investments into CRMs. And that was a challenge that we had when I joined. Valuations were literally running at a couple of thousand a month across all CRMs. By the time I left, you were running into the millions and that was over pretty much a five to seven year period. So the wealth industry had exactly the same challenge. I think the benefit for us as an industry is that we’ve got that learning from that team and the CRMs are so much better now in terms of getting these integrations up and running. But I’m not too close with the open finance, the technical detail behind it, but I absolutely guarantee that this debate in this topic is not going to be the last time that we talk about it at this particular forum.