Everything we covered on protection guru this week
I want to begin this week’s round-up but reflecting on an insight I published on Thursday, focusing on hospitalisation benefit included within some income protection plans. As with all of our insights, we provided a detailed overview of which insurers offer the benefit and the specifics on when it pays out and how is paid. I also asked a question “is hospitalisation benefit worth it?”.
The question I asked is an important one and something that I think is increasingly relevant when we talk about the plethora of different products, benefits and services now available. As the insight highlighted, whilst in the minds of many consumers an insurance product is simply there to pay-out if they claim, increasingly policies will provide a whole range of extra support, sometimes financial and in addition to the core benefits.
As an industry we need to ensure the features and benefits we offer clients are relevant, actually add value and provide the right solution for their needs. This is something product providers obviously need to be mindful of, but it’s also important for advisers to consider this as well.
Every client will have different needs and requirements and advisers now have an extensive range of products and benefits to chose from. Providing the right solution for those clients, that meets their needs and that provides them with truly useful and valuable benefits has never been more important, especially with many households having to make tough decisions on where they spend their money at the moment.
As ever at Protection Guru, we will continue to provide you with unbridled research, analysis and insights into the full range of protection products available. It has always been and will continue to be our aim, that we support advisers in growing the protection market by providing them with the resources to drive better recommendations
Turning to our regular protection content, we started this shorter week with coverage on Tuesday of new product improvements from Zurich. Whilst these updates brought nothing new to the table, we were particularly pleased to see Zurich significantly increase their underwriting free cover limits on life and critical illness cover.
On Wednesday we continued with the critical illness and underwriting theme and published an updated insight examining the underwriting limits on critical illness cover. We try to re-publish these articles a couple of times a year, with insurers regularly reviewing and updating their non-medical limits.
Thursday’s insight was the income protection hospitalisation benefit piece we’ve mentioned already and we finished the week on Friday with a round-up of product updates and developments from March and April.
As a reminder, it’s our monthly Protection Forum taking place on Tuesday 10th May. There’s still time for advisers to sign up for their free ticket here and we hope to have an engaging and stimulating discussion on how to better promote protection insurance to consumers.
AdviserSoftware.com
We provided further information about our upcoming AdviceTech Forum earlier this week. During the session we will be examining the implications of the new FCA Consumer Duty Paper and how it will affect customer communications.
We will be exploring:
- Dispelling the myth that Consumer Duty is TCF rebadged.
- Understanding what changes the FCA want to see around customer communications.
- Exploring the good practices firms can deploy to improve the way they communicate with clients.
- The impact this will have on technology firms who offer client facing applications.
- Reserve Your Space
During the session, we will be joined by our expert panel:
- Helena Wardle, Partner & Chartered Financial Planner, Smith & Wardle
- Alex Whitson, Managing Director, VouchedFor
- Andrew Storey, Proposition Director, EValue
Attendance is entirely free for advisers, who can book a place here.
Finally, a friendly reminder that there is still time to save 45% on tickets to our next Empowering Advice Through Technology (#EATT2022) conference next month.
