How did the industry perform in 2021? advisers tell us the good and bad

The good: “I think mental health is probably the most common disclosure we’ve had to deal with. A friend of mine lost his dad in 2017 and was put on medication for bereavement for a few months. And when I was looking to get him cover every insurer wanted to exclude mental health except for one insurer who offered us standard rates with no exclusion. I do think we’ve come a long way with mental health underwriting from where it was 5, 10, 15 years ago.”

The bad: “I had a case where a client had hurt his back, and the insurer took so long to make a decision that he was forced to go back to work because he couldn’t afford to pay his bills. They eventually honoured the claim but then reneged it because he’d gone back to work. I’ve had other claims where the communication was very poor or non-existent.”

The good: “I’m pretty new to the industry and I started right when Covid hit which wasn’t really a good time to start in the industry. So this year I made it my mission to make sure I got my message across to as many people as possible about how important insurance is. And of course winning the Protection Guru Award was the career highlight of my year.

My other positive point that I try to get out to all my clients is the importance of having a policy where you get more added benefits because for me there’s no point in paying all these premiums because you hope that you don’t have to claim on the policy so you may as well be getting something from it.

And I want to highlight how amazing I think certain providers are with their added benefits like the GP services and mental health support. I have my income protection through LV= and I went into their mental health support system through the app and you can get an appointment with a GP to discuss your mental health within 10 minutes.”

The bad: “The most annoying thing for me is that Covid is still used as an excuse for a lot of different things, which I don’t think it should be, especially with underwriting and GPs. This isn’t the insurers’ fault, but waiting for GP reports is the bane of my life. It’s very annoying that GPs don’t recognise the importance of getting the report to the insurer as soon as possible so the client is covered.

I have a case that I submitted in June and we are still waiting for the GP report—the GP acknowledged that it’s there and are just saying it’s on a list. Certain insurers don’t have any kind of tracking system on their website and it’s very annoying to have to phone up your BDM or underwriter any time you want an update. Certain providers you can just log in and see everything: if they’ve chased a GP, if they’re sent an email to the client. But then on others you can’t see a single thing.”

The good: “The start of insurers and advisers working together more has been a big positive for me. One thing that we’ve found through the pandemic has been so many examples of speaking with insurers in regards to possible changes that could be made or improvements for the clients journey and decisions.

Being able to speak directly with an underwriter can make a massive impact to a client’s decision as we see more and more medical disclosures, so I love speaking to them on the more complex cases as that means then we can get a better outcome for our client. So underwriters taking more documents from clients directly as well as diagnosis and treatment and discharge letters and the process is helping clients get covered sooner. For me, collaboration between advisers and insurers is very needed and being able to be involved with that and the processes insurers do.”

The bad: “In the last 12 months, a lot of changes have been made for the clients journey through the Covid period. Now we’ve noticed when insurers change their acceptance terms, we are discovering that their ratings have changed as well. So when we’ve requoted or gone for resubmission it would be great if we could have insurers send notifications out to all advisers to let them know about these changes because the worst thing for us is when we pre-underwrite a client and then two weeks later when we go ahead wit the submission we’re seeing an increase in premiums by 50% to just the BMI loadings.”

The good: “If I had to put everything under one term, I’d say “growth.” I think there’s been a lot in terms of us getting access to more people, doing more video content, talking more about claims and now we have to put our money where our mouth is. If we don’t talk about it, who else is going to? No one. I think there’s been real growth in terms of us showing real personalities this year. I know it has for me, but it’s been great to see others as well because we are real people and we talk like real people. We get annoyed at GPs like real people. I think it’s really important to recognise that growth and also ensure that it continues.

I think there’s been some growth with some of the insurers as well. We’ve seen the added value benefits improve over the course of the year. We’ve seen some changes in processes and some bits moving online, no one is perfect yet but they are trying, though maybe not quite as hard as they should be.”

The bad: “My low point is around pre-underwriting. How many times have they changed the goal posts on us this year? You ring, get an indication of the terms, and two weeks later it’s different. At one point it was a day later, and you can’t predict it.

But it’s also the waiting times and spending so much time on hold waiting. Because it’s lovely that we’ve got these online portals where if you’ve got a client that fits into a nice box we can get a good indication—but if they don’t fit in that box then we have to do the online portal and then still ring and then it’s lengthier and then they haven’t heard of the condition or they want to send you somewhere else. In the past month we’ve seen the wait times creep back up and email response times getting slower.”

The good: “My title covering off everything would be: claims, claims, claims. The ABI claim report found that in 2020 there was £6.2 billion paid in life, IP, and CI claims, which is £17 million a day with over 98% of claims being paid to 325,000 people and their families.

So to put that into context, and this one works for me as a proud Welshman sat in an office here in South Wales, but that is the entire population of Cardiff. If I was to go door knocking around here or walk down Queen Street, St Mary Street, every person I see would be someone that had made a claim on their policy. It’s incredible.”

The bad: “Ahead of this session I checked a number of the current turnaround times with insurers for assessing medical information in relation to claims. It ranged from anything from two days—well done, Aviva—up to 18 working days by other insurers which is almost a month to get a piece of medical information assessed. If that medical information doesn’t have what they need it goes back out to the relevant party and when it comes in you’ve got to wait another 18 days.

We should be serving our clients a whole lot better at that point in the process. We want customers to trust the insurance industry and be confident in the policies that they hold, and we can boast these fantastic claims stats… but when the rubber hits the road and we’re dealing with someone who’s terminally ill or their partner has just passed away, we really need to do better.”

The good: “For me, my common theme is access, access, access. For my positive I wanted to look specifically at something in Cura. We’re going through a period of growth at Cura which is great, but we’ve got quite a few trainees on board and we set our stall out very, very early that we wanted all of our advisers to be industry qualified, which was a benchmark we’d set.

But this actually presented a problem because we want to make a career at Cura open and accessible and have been disability confident for many years and the two things don’t always go together… We want our adviser roles to be open to people who have autism, who are dyslexic, who have ADHD. Some of you might have come across a new charity called GAIN and if you haven’t I would really recommend looking into it. If someone is neurodiverse, they can find exams very difficult. You can get some people whose knowledge is absolutely incredible but can never sit or pass an exam. And does that really mean that we would not allow them to advise at Cura? That’s not what we wanted to do.

So we’ve started developing an internal assessment—not because it’s cheaper or quicker but because we want to be an accessible employer and actually have adviser roles for people who have got disabilities. People who are neuro-diverse, people who got health conditions, for example, and we’re talking to the IBF and CII about this as well as GAIN.”

The bad: “In 2019 it felt like we were making good practice around underwriting and accessibility, and I felt like doors were starting to open for people with medical conditions. And then the 2020 pandemic hit and all of a sudden we saw all of these restrictions come into place.

We’re now at the end of 2021 and we’ve seen some insurers remove or at least ease the restrictions, but not everyone has gone there. There are working with the same restrictions or very similar to what they were at the height of the pandemic last year, regardless of vaccination status. I had a client who had cancer seven years ago, under no follow-up treatment, fully discharged, double vaccinated, and she was postponed due to risk of Covid because apparently the loading was too high under current guidelines.

And my worry is do we ever get past that in some ways, because the bar has now been dropped and we’ve got one in five people living with disabilities in the UK? It’s a big market, and I know we said, well, insurers sorry said it was two percent of clients that we weren’t offering cover to.

I think every adviser who’s on this forum probably knows that figure is a lot higher than that because the two percent would only be relevant for the people who actually applied and then were turned down. But how many of us now ring up insurers do pre-sales and are told beforehand “we cannot offer this cover”?

The good: 

“I really understand this issue we have around the underwriting process and claims, and maybe I can tie it to distribution quality because I think all three are intrinsically linked. And when I look at what did I see as a real positive this year, and I think it has been growing, is our focus on distribution quality. So how we engage with customers, how we position the protection conversation, how we gather disclosures, all of that ultimately has an impact on whether we can actually pay a claim at the end of the day.

“Lifesearch has been pushing on customer outcomes, and they sponsored a paper, actually started last year, with Contact State on Protecting the Protectors, and it was all about the state of the lead generation market. In June this year we saw Google take action, we saw Advertising Standards Authority take action as well about how we actually engage with customers and how we position life insurance. I think that’s really important.

I don’t think we’ve finished that by any measure. I think the day that the FCA drops their consultation paper on consumer duty is going to be really key that we keep working on this. For me, it’s all about us putting consumer outcomes at the forefront of what we do as an industry bringing quality into what we do and actually being careful that what we do doesn’t cheapen our product, doesn’t cheapen the service that we give.”  

The bad:

“For me it’s about engagement. We’ve done great work on access to insurance but we’re not really still engaging with as many people as we should. Our product is low engagement, and that’s something I’ve seen in whatever position I’ve been in. Maybe there’s hope, though, because I absolutely love what people like Robyn Allen are doing on Tik Tok. I just think that’s great. We’re hopefully getting to new customers in a different way than we’ve ever thought possible. There’s a theme about telling stories in a different way. So I think what I’d love to see us as an industry is really focussing on engagement now and bringing more people to be protected.

“I’d also like to bring it back to underwriting. Starting my career over 30 years ago as an underwriter, the one thing that probably I’ve been really disappointed in that I’ve never really changed the way we fundamentally underwrite. The questions we asked today are very similar to what we asked three decades ago. The process is the same 30-40 questions, get medical evidence to check the answers and then apply sort of aggregate ratings on to people. Other sectors that deal with risk have moved on tremendously, are using different data, different sources. I think we’re going to struggle now to rely on underwriting tools that we have, which is GP reports. We’ve all heard about the delay. You know, the NHS service isn’t geared up now to providing reports in the way that we had them. I think it’s time to stop tweaking underwriting and fundamentally shift how we underwrite. But it does link up to good distribution because I think we can enable insurers and reinsurers to move in a different way if we can guarantee good disclosures and good distribution as well.”