How to improve client outcomes and increase your own income, plus other analysis from Protection Guru last week

So much to write about this week that I believe is important for Advisers, so please bear with me before you decide if you want to read all of the following, that said it’s probably easiest to click the link below to get to the full story.

Among the subjects covered are:

• The latest update on the FCA Pure Protection Review
• Details on how advisers can significantly increase their income and achieve better customer outcomes
• Details of our latest training courses to help you have better protection conversations and again grow your income
• Really valuable updates on the latest medical practice around
  • Prostate cancer
  • Brain tumours
• Why Critical Illness plans will probably never be as good in the future as they are now so why advisers should recommend and review clients policies urgently
• Links to both our recent Forum events on Children’s Critical Illness
• Analysis of special product features we think advisers will want to understand as they are very attractive for consumers coming from:
  • Royal London
  • Vitality
  • Zurich

I think it’s fair to say the above demonstrates it was a busy week at Protection Guru.

The first rule of news media is any story is only as good as the rest of the news that day, so it was really frustrating on Friday that, just as I finished my original version of this summary the FCA came up with revised terms of reference for the Pure Protection Review.

I will write a more detailed summary in the next few days of what has changed from the original terms of reference but if you just want the bullet points, here is my summary of the Pure Protection Review in around 500 words

Before the FCA intervened, I was going to say the most significant news to appear on Protection Guru last week was the data on how much additional income per policy our system was able to generate for our users in Q4/2024 – all while benefiting consumers.

If you’re not already using Protection Guru Pro (PGP), you are potentially losing out on an additional income of nearly £300 per plan you write (£295.60 in Q4/24 to be precise). This is the average increase in commission that would’ve been generated by clients taking the best value policy as identified by our software rather than just buying the cheapest product. Most importantly, we are helping advisers improve consumer outcomes.

As the only service that allows advisers in the UK to look at quality and price to assess value across the full suite of protection products, PGP enables advisers to meet their FCA consumer duty obligations to identify the protection products that represent best value for their clients, rather than simply the cheapest, across life insurance, critical illness, income and business protection.
The table below shows the average increase in income for advisers based on each different type of product where best value was recommended rather than cheapest price:

To help Advisers learn more about how to take advantage of this, we now organise weekly training courses on a range of subjects that can help improve your protection conversations and show you how to use our technology. The latest example is covered here:

Learn Why not all Life Policies are the Same To recognise your time in joining us for this one hour session currently we are also providing a 60-day licence for you to try the software free of charge. This is conditional on you actually using the software regularly in that period. We are thinking of cutting this back to 30 days so if you want a 60-day trial it would be good to register from the link above as soon as you can if you’d like to take advantage.

Also this week on our training content we had a great article from Matt Chapman on  why talking budget is a recipe for disaster

Additionally, our medical panel produce some excellent insights into:

Why new tests for Prostate cancer mean Critical Illness cover may not be so generous in the future. Within this article you can also learn why critical illness cover will probably never be as good in the future as it is now so it’s wise to review any clients existing plans as soon as you can. Obviously, Protection Guru Pro can help you with that too.

As it’s brain tumour awareness month we also produced two studies on the subject.
How will emerging therapies change the way benign brain tumours are covered in critical illness? This again highlights why cover may never be as good again as it is now and How Malignant brain tumours are covered in critical illness plans

Similarly last week Amanda Newman Smith looked at Should the protection industry do more to promote value-added benefits?

Last week we also published the second part of our recent forum on Children’s Critical Illness Cover – March Forum Recap Part 2 Including tremendous insight from Emma Astley of Cover My Bubble and Karla Edwards from The Protection Parent who were amazing on this session sharing their comprehensive knowledge on the issue.  If you missed part one which we published the week before you can find it here . As I pointed out last week there are tremendous insights for both insurers and advisers in these two sessions.

Finally, it’s been a busy time for product updates in the last few weeks, so we looked at why we like Vitality’s Accident and Fracture Cover and  Zurich’s Return to Work Package. Both of these include significant policy enhancements which advises will I’m sure want to understand in detail. Lastly we looked at how to use a service that proves popular time and time again with advisers Royal London’s Underwrite Later

Apologies if this is a long summary this week, but I hope that all the above is useful to you.