Lessons learnt from Consumer Duty implementation – Adviser views

“There’s been a real change in their mindset from when I’ve been speaking to them about how they position it to their client from what they used to do. Obviously not saying this as everyone, but the ones that we deal with, they were always kind of trying to refer them over just to say, to have protection is a good thing to do. You should have this. But there was no real kind of meat on the bone in terms of why they should have it, where now it’s more of a what would you do if you were ill or what would you do if one of you passed away? How would you then pay for the mortgage? And that then in turn, I find as you have better protection conversations, when they come through, they’re more, more, more receptive because they’re not seeing it as just a kind of good thing to do.”

“There has been a mammoth amount of effort that we’ve all put in collectively. I definitely walk away three months on seeing the benefit to protection across the network, which is good. So what have we learnt? Communication can always be improved. That first email that goes from an advisor to a client can be revamped or words that are industry words can be removed. What we also found is if we had administrators within firms who were experienced coming in and reviewing communications, sometimes they would default to acronyms just because that’s all they know and they’re not thinking about it from a client lens they’re thinking about from their lens and the process lens. So we’ve definitely learned that actually communication can definitely improve it and you’ll see things in a very different way, which is good because actually we’re using simpler language far more now than ever before.”

“Consumer duty has absolutely led to wealth advisors feeling the need to re-engage and avoid foreseeable harm, as well as mortgage advisors who might not have had that protection conversation… It might be actually some of our advisors are providing more documentation, but that’s less in quantity, but more of the right documentation. And it isn’t all just words. So some of it is pictorial, some of it is sort of reference stuff which is useful, and people are using their websites and social media a lot more in the right way.”

“We’re having good, thorough conversations around it and it’s continuing. We’ve definitely put more resource in place for engagement, campaigns and signposting to make sure we’re doing our best to avoid that foreseeable harm. So more personnel for stronger campaign activity.”

“There are more and more requests for face-to-face rather than virtual, which is quite interesting because some of these are individuals who’ve sold protection ten years ago are now coming back in, but they are trying to get their face-to-face element rather than the virtual element. And virtual is so much easier and so much more engaging. And some of our providers are superb in terms of the technology. They’ve even got to be able to see whether people are focussed on the screen or not. We know that actually face-to-face where possible is having a better impact and outcome than virtual sessions. But we’ll continue to balance those.”

“I think consumer duty has made firms stop and think where they have the insurance regulatory permissions. Are we going to do this in house? Are we going to signpost? Are we going to refer? And as part of that, they’ve then reviewed their processes to make sure that it is a consistent approach, that there’s no customers falling through the net.”

“Our network advisors have had a very challenging 12 months at the same time as implementing consumer duty. We’ve had a mortgage market that’s gone bananas and we’ve been implementing a new CRM system, so they’ve had a lot to cope with… we’ve actually extended our referral options, particularly in the day space, or actually recruiting protection specialists within their business for them to be referring in-house, which has been really positive.”

“We’ve always kind of had an issue when the mortgage market is busy because protection sort of gets pushed to one side. I get the feeling that you’ve got mortgage advisors who are genuinely wanting to do protection, but it’s not just the fact that they’re just too busy on mortgages because they just want the new sales in. It’s the three four times the amount of work that’s involved in a mortgage just to get it through. That’s actually creating a bit of a challenge, which is why we are really promoting to advisors the importance of just referring even on just a temporary basis, even if long term you don’t want to be doing that as a actual business decision.”

“More protection conversations is absolutely going to lead to more, more people being covered. Um, but we just need to make sure that all those advisors that really want to learn have got the support behind them to actually be able to, you know, enable them to have those really good quality conversations so that consumers really understand what they’re doing. But there just needs to be as much support as possible.”

“We get a lot of firms talk about the fact that they just do not get any visits from insurers and they’re really lamenting that, so for those of us that have been around for a long time, they’re really talking about the days when they used to be able to see people regularly. There was that real positive interaction. And we’ve seen those distribution teams with the insurer space reduce significantly over the last sort of five to fifteen years. And I do wonder whether that needs to be perhaps rethought. I appreciate that that is a resource that can be quite costly and time-consuming. But at the same time, when you have got advisors that are clearly saying we’d love to have that, that’s really important to us because that would really help with our understanding of protection, our engagement with the insurers and most importantly, the conversations with the clients.”