A day of recognition and celebration (and everything else we covered last week)
There is nothing more humbling than sharing an afternoon with the best and greatest our industry offers and celebrating the awesome work they do. There is no doubt that the protection market has a lot to do to ensure more families are protected and that when physical or mental health fails, a families finances are not a concern but having sat in a room jam packed with individuals and firms that share that goal gives me a huge amount of hope.
The Protection Guru awards took place last Friday with great success. There were a wide range of winners and over the coming days and weeks we will be releasing more pictures, feedback on the winners and sharing some of the amazing entries we received.
Turning to our regular Protection Guru content, we kicked things off last Monday with the first of our insights to mark October’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month, with this piece examining the underwriting impact of the client having a history of breast cancer. Where the client has had cancer in the past, access to protection insurance products can be limited, so these underwriting insights are an important way of hopefully educating and explaining the possible underwriting outcomes advisers and their clients may encounter. Keep an eye out for our second insight on this subject, published later today.
On Tuesday we turned our attention to life and critical illness insurance and specifically the waiver of premium benefit offered by insurers. This insight followed a recent announcement from Legal & General of an improvement to their maximum entry age for waiver of premium, so we took the opportunity to compare options from across the market.
So called ‘added-value benefits’ are a subject we regularly cover on Protection Guru and update throughout the year as insurers make adjustments or changes to their proposition (most of these benefits are non-contractual), so can change from time to time. On Wednesday we focused on health MOTs and some of the options offered by insurers, usually included as part of their respective health support benefits.
Sticking with the same theme, we turned our attention to another support benefit on Thursday, this time with an insight examining which insurers provide access to physiotherapy services. The focus here was less on the rehab support following a claim, which is something most insurers will offer, but instead the range of physiotherapy benefits, including in-person and virtual appointments with a qualified physiotherapist.
Finally, we rounded off the week with a focus on claims and claim stories. We’ve added a new page to our Claims Hub for life insurance claim case studies, which presently features a powerful example from Legal & General of a client who claimed on their terminal illness benefit. And Friday’s insight presented three real-life claim case-studies shared with us by LV=, each of which tells a story about the value and importance of income protection insurance. As ever, we’d encourage advisers to share these examples far and wide with their peers and clients, to hopefully help dispel any myths that protection insurance is unnecessary and doesn’t pay out.
