How can insurers better engage with the technology advisers use (part one)

“The protection market is definitely becoming more complicated. We’ve got options galore and this is brilliant because it gives advisors and customers choice, which is absolutely fantastic. But one of the unintended consequences with this is that actually we can risk putting advisors off, especially, say wealth advisors and people who do lots of other things because it’s not just a case of now, well, actually I’ll do a little bit of term insurance and I’ll just submit it to this insurer because they’re the cheapest. There’s far more involved in that, hence the need for the portals and everything like that. But I do think we run the risk as an industry, and we have probably already seen the consequences of this, of putting people off by making it too complicated. I think insurers can work on this with the current tech that they’ve been doing to make it better and easier for advisors. Because if we’re not making it easy for advisors, then we’re doing even more to put them off.”

“So we’ve got a review team at Cura. They do an annual review of every customer, whether it’s in indemnity or out of indemnity. Customers get an email at least once a year reminding them what they’ve got. And I know we’re not alone in this. And there are a couple of providers where we can log on to their system. We can get current sum assured, we can get current premium or we might have had an annual review document, and we’ve got a copy of that. But there are still some of them where we’ve got to ring them up. We’ve got to say ‘What’s the current rate?’ because it’s a decreasing policy or it’s RPI linked or ‘What’s the premium?’ It’s a right faff. It’s a waste of our time. It’s a waste of an insurer’s time. You have that information, it’s on your database, it’s there so why can we not just access that? It would be so simple.”

“This is really useful information, and especially for wealth advisors who are almost committed to do these annual reviews. It’s not a requirement in protection. It should be. there are still providers out there who either don’t have an online trust or if you do have an online trust, you need electronic signatures. if you need an electronic signature, we do a paper trust. We fill in a PDF version of it and we send it to the client to sign. Because clients struggle with e-signatures. Signature-free beneficiary nomination.”

“And it’s meant that actually nearly 100% of our single life policies where there is a signature free trust or a beneficiary nomination is now put into trust. These are simple things that can be used to then promote really good habits with advisors.”

“Pre-sales tools are fantastic. They use some really good ones and some of them tap in directly into the reinsurers engines now. So for us that’s great. But again, if you’ve got an advisor there who doesn’t do lots of protection, who comes across a medical condition they don’t know about, they can tap it in and find out what that decision might be. The issue, however, comes when you force the use of that. So if you’re forcing that to be done before you can have access to an underwriter, again, it’s a time consuming element for advisors. It’s not making the job easier.”  

“The industry hasn’t done much. We’re kind of dinosaurs in terms of adopting technology, but we have still done stuff as an industry and there are a few key areas I want to focus. So new business, it’s online now. There’s extra nets you can hand off, maybe not for all providers, but that’s a massive step forward that the industry made by having online application forms that aren’t paper that gives that ability to hand off. It’d be fantastic if more providers could do that.”

“It’s a lot better that there are online underwriting journeys because people with not very complex medical conditions can get straight through processing. It’s not having to go to manual underwriting constantly. That is a good step forward. There’s absolutely loads of room that needs to be done. There’s rules that exist now. They’re trying to make steps and claims. We have seen claim journeys go online, get more digital, kind of having claims portals, and being able to do a claims form online with the use of e-signatures. So as an industry as a whole, we have absolutely done some great steps. There’s still probably a lot more that we need to do, but progress is being made and this is where I’m going to really talk about how IPipeline we are supporting the industry with this change. Alan, you may not like is that we support Scottish widows with their trust forms, which has an e-signature on it. And as you said, you would not use a trust form with an e-signature and I see this as a huge step forward because actually I look at it from my perspective. If someone said the only way you can get a trust for put your policy in trust is to fill in a form, send it back to me as your advisor and I’ll send it into Scottish widows, I wouldn’t fill the form in. I would forget about it. It would live on my kitchen table and my policy would just never go into trust. So e-signatures is a massive step forward from paper trust forms.” 

“I completely understand Alan though you’re going into that signature-free world, which is an even quicker straight-through process. But it’s great to see providers are trying to adopt change. If they’re not into that signature-free, they’re adopting that e-signature, they are helping that process. So it’s not paper-based.”

“The three big opportunities in and two are more towards providers and ones more towards the advising side… I think annual statements are a massive opportunity to be able to be digitised. I get my annual statement from my provider in the post. It doesn’t really tell me a lot apart from my indexation and what my covers going up to, but actually having an annual statement. A question As a provider, how do you know your customers actually read that annual statement? You don’t. You have no idea if you’re posting out to them. But having a digital process where a customer can acknowledge that they’ve understood or even acknowledged that they’ve not understood, and therefore that can trigger a point of entry to make sure the customer understands their policy.”

“I think another area, orphaned clients, existing clients, kind of how often are we checking in to see if that cover is still fit for purpose? I do think orphaned clients is a really interesting one, especially with consumer duty at the moment. If they don’t have an advisor, whose responsibility is it to make sure their policies are fit for purpose? Their financial services products are what they need, their fair value. Again, using things like that life update form to go out and just say, ‘Have you had changes?’ Do we need to review anything really nice and simple and client onboarding documents? A lot of us delay onboarding clients because it’s paper or they say ‘we’re going to have a face-to-face meeting, so we’ll get it all done there now’. I think we’re COVID a lot of face-to-face has changed more to teams, but being able to just send out stuff, get replies instantly, get things signed, get things moving from a customer experience perspective just gives them a better experience of our industry and sometimes our experience of our industry isn’t that good. So if we can help from the offset on that client onboarding process, make it the most seamless, straightforward journey, it will massively help.”

“There are lots of areas we can improve and it’s very easy to be critical and I know it provider end. A lot of firms are investing a lot of money, putting a lot of time and effort into improving processes and systems.”

“Quick access to tools and having access to underwriters is really important to us. So most of the pre-sales tools that are available need to cover a wider range of conditions. At the moment you can usually with most put in one, maybe two conditions, but you can’t put in multiple conditions. So what you get then is a refer to underwriters and you end up emailing in or phoning up the underwriter anyway. So I’m sure it’s on people’s to-do list, but the sooner we can expand the ability to put in multiple conditions, that’s really important. And indeed the amount of conditions being covered because there are quite a few conditions that don’t appear on the drop-down list. So I’d also think we need to look at a wider range of conditions and to be able to put in multiple conditions.”

“BMI calculators are really helpful. I know most providers offer them, but not all. They’re really important. It’s probably the most common disclosure advisors are going to be picking up. It’s an obvious one. We should have BMI calculators online.”

“In our ideal world, feedback would actually be pushed from a provider system straight into our CRM system without the need for logging on to portals, without the need to phone up. And it’s just a straight push-through of data with status updates. But if that isn’t available, the next best solution is our ability to log on to portals. First of all, most importantly, the information needs to be clear to prevent us then having to phone up to actually clarify what the notes mean. Now, I know it sounds obvious, but quite all too often we end up picking up the phone anyway.”

“I can’t emphasise how important this is. Our ability to view client policy details, update direct debits, change address details and contact details, register claims, and request changes to policies. All of those could and should be able to be done online via a provider’s portal rather than having to pick up the phone or send an email.”

“Annual statements. These are absolutely vital. About 24.9 years is the average length of a policy. There are many, many thousands of policies, tens of thousands of policyholders who have probably never, ever heard a single thing from the provider or their advisor since taking out that policy years and years ago. And then as an industry, we wonder why people lapse their policies. Well, it’s not surprising really. If you look at your direct debit and you can’t remember what that £60 a month is all for, then it’s not surprising if times get a little bit tough that people just end up cancelling the policy either deliberately or inadvertently. Annual statements are vital, keeping clients up to date and well-informed whether they’re emailed or posted. I know some providers worry about spikes in lapse rates. It has the opposite effect, confirming what cover they have, who’s covered, how long they’re covered for, what’s the sum assured.”

“Part of their annual review process is to make sure that they sit down with their clients and not just talk about wealth, but also talk about their protection arrangements and make sure that it’s still suitable. So when whenever we arrange a policy for a partner, that information is put back onto their client records so they can pick that up and have that conversation on an annual and ongoing basis.”