The second half of the February Protection Forum turned from the problems of post-sale underwriting to potential solutions, with contributions from across the wider adviser community. Participants were united in accepting that post-sale underwriting is here to stay, but equally united in the view that without proper safeguards, foreseeable consumer harm is inevitable.
Advisers raised the compounding issue of inaccurate GP records, with examples shared of clients whose medical notes contained errors, including conditions attributed to the wrong patient entirely, that no amount of advocacy could quickly resolve. The discussion then moved to practical proposals for reform, including a suggestion that insurers should be required to identify replacement business at point of application, that post-sale checks should be subject to a strict time limit, that advisers should be notified immediately when a case is selected for sampling, and that premiums on the new policy should be paused during any review period to prevent clients facing double payments. Several participants called on the FCA to mandate these protections rather than leaving them to market practice, with the forum’s recording to be shared directly with the regulator.
Listen to the full session recording and explore the highlights below to hear how advisers and industry leaders are calling for a more responsive, transparent and human approach to underwriting.
“I can kind of get post-underwriting sampling on straight-through cases or cases where there’s been no disclosures… but I’ve got a real concern when they post-sample underwriting underwritten cases, because that says I don’t trust the underwriters at this insurer.”
“If it’s been underwritten once and accepted, then to go back and have a second bite of the cherry… that feels very wrong.”
“We’re starting to move into this very polarised space… where either you get cover or you don’t get cover and there’s little middle ground.”
“Post-sale underwriting… needs to have guardrails. You can’t wait six months after a policy has been issued and then just go, ‘Oh, by the way, we fancy having another look at this.’”
“In the whole article from the reinsurer… the word customer or consumer was not used once.”
Click the audio playback below to listen to the full session.
Full session audio
“From personal experience, I had a case in not so long ago and it all passed absolutely fine. And then they did some sampling and then the client unfortunately could not get cover.”
“They’d actually cancelled their existing cover before. So it’s just such a grey area because the problem is then you’ve got, they can’t have the old cover and they can’t have the new cover and then you’re stuck in no man’s land.”
“Luckily, we did get it with another provider and it’s absolutely fine… but it is literally playing with people’s lives who are insured, which is just not right.”
