Our 2021 protection product ratings – everything you need to know
At the end of April we published our protection Product Ratings for 2021, which pull together our detailed research and analysis on each insurers proposition and assigns them a gold, silver or bronze rating, across both the core products and the different features and benefits. Our extensive benchmarking of protection products, along with our expert doctors analysis of critical illness definitions, underpins the work we do and our annual ratings. Within each core cover the various features we have rated are based upon those most commonly selected by advisers, so the focus is very much on the things that matter to advisers and their clients.
At Protection Guru we believe passionately that detailed comparisons of products based on quality rather than simply price can drive better consumer outcomes. The simple one-page summaries provide a quick but comprehensive analysis of who offers the best products in the market for each different product type that advisers can use to support recommendations, including printing or downloading them to keep on compliance files.
Our ratings, which cover all of the main protection providers, include the following products:
- Income Protection
- Critical Illness without Children’s Cover
- Critical Illness with Children’s Cover
- Life Protection
- Mortgage Protection (stand alone)
- Mortgage Protection with Critical Illness
- Family Income Benefit (stand alone)
- Family Income Benefit with Critical Illness
- Business Protection (stand alone)
- Business Protection with Critical Illness
For participating insurers we have also created a one-page summary of their strengths across their products and policy features. You can read more about those insurers in the insights below.
HOW GUARDIAN ACHIEVED GOLD ACROSS THE BOARD
To anyone that is familiar with the Guardian proposition, the fact that they scored gold in every category of our ratings where they offer a product will probably come as no surprise. They came into the protection market in 2018 with a clear aim to shake up the protection industry by challenging the norm and to this day this continues to be reflected in their products. In this insight we looked at Guardian’s 2021 Protection Guru ratings in more detail, across the range of features and products they offer.
HOW ROYAL LONDON EXCELLED IN OUR RATINGS
Royal London’s excellent performance in this years ratings continues their excellent run in our ratings, having performed admirably over the last few years. One of the aspects of the Royal London proposition that we particularly like at Protection Guru is the range of options they offer in order to meet different needs. This is particularly apparent with regard to their critical illness offering where they offer standard or enhanced children’s cover as well as an option to not include children’s cover at all. In this insight we looked at how Royal London faired in our ratings across their various protection products.
HOW LV= ACHIEVED GOLD ACROSS THE BOARD
LV= have offered a strong income protection proposition for some time, however 2020 was a big year in terms of product development and strengthening their offerings for other benefits. In January 2020 LV= launched the upgrade of their critical illness offering, which was followed in July by launch of their enhanced children’s cover and a new family income benefit offering. These improvements certainly made their menu proposition far more appealing and provided clients with more choice not only in terms of the benefits on offer but the structure of benefits. In this third in our serious of insights looking into how individual insurers came out in our ratings, we focused on the LV proposition.
