This is the second post recounting great discussion from our May Protection Forum focusing on helping mortgage advisers to sell protection products and raising consumer awareness around the importance of protection.

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Would having simpler products help mortgage advisers?

Simple products can be good for advisers who aren’t as comfortable with protection.

Setul’s LinkedIn profile

Setul Mehta: So I’m supportive broadly of the concept of simpler products or straight, three, four, five questions. And there you go. I remember Zurich came out with something called Face Quote in which you take a picture of yourself, you have a selfie, and then actually it broadly asked you five, six questions and it gave you a quote. And I think it’s valuable for those who are maybe inexperienced or don’t engage too much and like a bit of tech in front of their clients, if it gets those that are not talking about protection to protect clients, great. For those who talk about protection already and are comfortable with having the conversation. I think actually you probably end up staying away from three, four or five question-led outcomes because you’d want to have the wider conversation. If you’re experienced you can see those areas that would trigger underwriting queries or questions or what you want to bring in or what’s relevant and important to a client. But for those who don’t engage in protection conversations, if it makes it easier and it gets them into that protection conversation and it opens their eyes and engages them, then they will naturally move on to a more robust conversation.

A lot of the newer clients we’ve had are younger but still have lots of disclosures around mental health and medical conditions.

Cover My Bubble’s website

Emma’s LinkedIn profile

Emma Astley: I think this is just based on the type of clients we’ve had coming through over the last six months. Our clients are usually about 21 to 45, but a lot of them have mental health conditions, medical problems, and some have had critical illnesses already, or take regular medication. We’re finding that a lot more of our cases are going through the underwriting process. So I don’t think they could be answering all the questions “no, no, no,” because a lot that were submitted recently, they’ve all got disclosures, especially on the mental health side. PTSD has increased massively for traumatic births, break-ups in relationships. Bipolar is a big one as well that we’re seeing at the moment, OCD, all different types of medical conditions around the mental health sector. So I don’t know if simplifying things might not protect clients, if you know what I mean. I think it might leave some clients vulnerable and at risk. But that’s based on our clients currently.

It’s about creating a positive company culture. There’s already a lot of flexibility in products, it’s about making sure all advisers are having the right kinds of conversations with clients.

Paul McDowell:

Listening to the conversation so far, I’ve been involved as a mortgage broker in the past. I’ve also worked for a mortgage network in the management team and I work for an insurer. So I think the big thing here is about culture. If you have an organisation that is prepared to organise loans for clients and take the fee and not take the responsibility for helping them stay in their home, that’s fine. That’s your culture. If you have a culture whereby you want to produce a better product and the advice is the product at the end of the day and you want to differentiate yourself with other people, then I think it’s incumbent upon you to find a way of doing that. And whether you do it in a two part sale or however you do it through signposting, that’s not the issue.

I think the issue from the client’s point of view is understanding what they’re getting right day one to set the roadmap out, we talked about signposting. So there’s no nasty surprises. I think most people are happy to go along with what they think they’re getting it’s when they don’t get it or they get something different that you encounter a problem. Simplified products. Yes, they have a place. But actually, I think the products that we have out there already have enough flexibility and choice to give consumers what they need, suiting their budget or suiting their family needs and future needs and so on. So I think there’s enough flexibility in there.

And we talk an awful lot in this industry that products and bolt-ons and whiz bang ideas. But actually, when it comes down to it, the thing that makes the difference is the “how” it’s not the “what” and it’s the conversations that advisers are having, or not having as the case may be, that will drive better sales, more sales and more protected families. And I think the other thing is I hear a lot about mortgage advisers being really, really busy, and that’s fantastic.

But if you’re busy doing half the job as opposed to doing half the customers with a full job, then I wonder whether, again, whether your culture allows it, that’s fine. But if it doesn’t, then how do you get around that? How do you have a compliance department that wants to tick the boxes to say you’ve had a protection conversation and if you can get a sentence in the demands and needs, it says we discussed it, but you didn’t want to do anything at this time. Is that good enough? Well, that lets the adviser off the hook. And does that then lead to an unprotected family later on?

There isn’t enough media/advertising coverage by the industry (insurers together or the FCA Money Pensions Service) encouraging consumers to plan for the future.

Zanele’s LinkedIn profile

Towergate website

Zanele Sibanda: I do think that as an industry or even the FCA Money Pension Service or whoever it is, have got a responsibility to raise awareness or to kick-start the conversation, because that will be a fairly generic topic, just highlighting the risks and the reasons why, and then referring customers to speak to your adviser. We’ve done this with pensions. We’ve done this with PPI. We’ve done this with a number of other things. But where mortgage cover and life cover in general is such a topical issue and we see the impact of not having it there’s more publicity for the Go Fund Me campaigns of this world and the lack of cover and the devastating impact. But there’s not enough coverage for the reasons why we should plan for the future. So there’s got to be something that either insurers can do in combination or the money and pension service can do, or even the ABI, just a generic awareness piece that helps that helps that conversation for advisers.

A lot of the time advertising for protection involves talking about difficult topics that can be sensitive for consumers and have caused backlash in the past. Consumers also don’t respond well to the insurers doing the advertising as they do to charities, etc. sharing information.

Emma Thomson:

So I mentioned the Aviva piece. To be fair, you might all remember the Paul Whitehouse advert they did, which was actually nearly 10 years ago now. But that was really powerful, too. But the backlash they got specifically from Downton Abbey, which I think they did as a sponsorship deal because it was Sunday night viewing, people didn’t want to be disturbed and whether it was perhaps an inappropriate time that perhaps got that backlash. But I don’t think they necessarily would have won. I’m sure it was about a motorcycle rider, if I remember rightly. It was quite a few years ago now. But, you know, we were all looking at it going, “that’s a really great advertising piece, trying to obviously disturb clients, get them to think about the dangers ahead and the risks involved and what actually the solutions could be.” But ultimately it didn’t particularly wear well with the consumers.

But interestingly, I’m sure at the time there was also a charity advertising about accidents or something, and that didn’t have the same level of backlash. I think it’s just the consumer obviously has issues with insurers and they just see it as trying to make money, claims don’t get paid, that kind of thing. Whereas obviously charity talking about injuries and accidents and that kind of thing, they’re more likely to welcome that as an informative piece. So it’s difficult, as I said, for insurers to kind of get it right, given the type of topics that we’re talking about here.

Insurers do get the backlash because it looks like profiteering a delicate subject, so a unified approach is definitely better.

Ian’s LinkedIn

Ian Sawyer: Insurers do get that backlash. I also think it’s a challenge for them in terms of investment and a return on it. It does feel like profiteering on a delicate subject. So I think it would be much better performed by a unified approach. The Industry tried to do this or Lifesearch led with Tom many, many years ago and tried to do it. And Roy has tried to do it and everyone but, this is where the regulator really needs to step up. This is where the industry needs to come together. There has to be a way, perhaps with a small levy based on gross written premium or some simple mechanism. But there needs to be public service broadcasting to send the messages out. And the government should be backing this on the basis of what we’ve just seen is the greatest income protection system that this country has ever seen in furlough. That’s exactly the purpose of insurance, is to protect, especially income protection. So, getting to people and encouraging people to protect themselves properly should be a relevant, viable public service broadcast. But going back to an earlier point, just to add a couple comments, I don’t think we deliver mortgage brokers with the right product. And I think we spend an awful lot of time in this industry skirting around the periphery of the issues. The issues with selling protection is it’s too hard, it’s laborious, lots of questions. It takes 40 minutes to go through an application and people get rejected for cover through the underwriting. There are simple products and there’s simple underwriting. Simple products usually mean a smaller question set and less people get covered. That’s not the answer. We should move to a wider acceptance of underwriting with higher premiums is where we really need to go. And the product that a mortgage broker requires is positioned around the fulcrum of protecting their income so they can maintain their mortgage and then have life insurance and riders off of the side of that. That’s a mortgage protection product. And I would say it must include unemployment cover. Going back to a previous contributor saying about mortgage payment protection. It is a really important product. There’s a demand for that product, especially when it comes back eventually, as unemployment doesn’t exist at the moment, that’s got to be part of the mix. So for me, if we’re really going to solve the problems, we’ve really got to start with a blank piece of paper and design a mortgage protection product which works for mortgage brokers. Otherwise…, how many times have we had this conversation in the last 20 years.

People don’t watch TV advertisements anymore, stories being incorporated into soaps and TV programs themselves would be better.

Neil Jackson: Yes, the only points I’m raising here is that I think adverts are becoming much less impactful because of the fact that TV on demand people fast forward through the adverts. I know we do. Then often if you see things on TV, the adverts don’t appear anyway. And there’s been a couple of soaps that have carried really serious subjects, coercion being one of them. And I just wonder whether or not we could get the insurance companies to work together or even the trade bodies, for that matter, to look at carrying a storyline over the soaps, possibly over a number of weeks, because that will have more impact. And we know people watch them in their millions.