The big news last week was of course Legal & General’s withdrawal of Fracture Cover in addition to changes to their Critical Illness and Income Protection Plans. Despite multiple requests at the time of writing I have still not received all the information I have requested concerning some of their new process and services. Once I have the necessary information, I will be producing a detailed analysis of this, and all the other changes Legal & General have made. That said, candidly most of the rest of the changes were fairly obscure.
As far as the Critical Illness updates go, our doctors have told us that only one of these is of any real significance, the incidence rates are so minor they are very rare. That said, if you are a family where a child has the misfortune to have the condition it is better to be covered. More on this as soon as I receive the extra information from Legal & General.
The important thing here is helping the many advisers who have sold this cover via Legal & General since it was introduced in early 2021 and have now been landed with a considerable Consumer Duty headache.
It has even been suggested to me that from an FCA perspective even clients sold cover on an execution only basis will need to be contacted. I am in the process of explicitly validating this point but if so, that could be an enormous problem for the aggregators and other non-advised firms.
We are going to be running a series of special activities to support advisers who have been put in this unenviable position. This will include a special meeting of our Protection Forum dedicated to the regulatory challenges Legal & General’s action leaves firms facing and what the options are to help clients. You can click this link to register to join this session.
We are also currently pulling together a detailed update of all our analysis of Fracture Cover across the market and will be operating a series of events for advisers to help them understand their responsibilities to readvise clients who have had such cover previously.
Turning to other content on Protection Guru last week; a week full of detailed analysis on the granularity of cover and conditions, the sort of analysis that distinguishes us from other information sources. Jason Coleman has certainly been busy, and he started the week looking at What return to work career support services do Income Protection Providers offer?
As last week was Multiple Sclerosis awareness week, Jason then looked at Multiple Sclerosis and Critical Illness Cover: How Earlier Diagnosis and Modern Policies Benefit Clients before a piece addressing Turning client objections to Income Protection around.
Wednesday saw Jason turn to one of my favourite products looking at Are you missing out on the best way to cover families cheaply? The case for Family Income Benefit.
As May is Huntington’s Awareness month 1st May was a great day for part one of a study on Understanding Huntington’s Disease: A Guide for Protection Advisers.
On Thursday we held a tremendous Protection Forum on Business Protection, look out for the details from this soon. We wrapped up the week with two great training studies one from Gary Waters who looked at Why solving problems beats selling products every time and then Matt Chapman with Income protection: How to ensure your clients go for full term over short term.
Have a tremendous week everyone and please feel free to drop us a note if you can think of any other things Protection Guru can do to help advisers caught up in the Legal & General Fracture Cover debacle.
