Protection News Weekly Roundup: Top Stories You Might Have Missed – 10-03-2025

Protection Guru’s primary mission is to help the protection market grow by supporting Advisers with the information they need to write more protection business, so we see genuine growth.

Over the past couple of months, you may have noticed a significant change in the content we are providing. First there is more of it, we are now producing at least two pieces of new or updated content a day.

Also, from this month we are looking to provide more on the various awareness days in advance of the actual days to help advisers create their own marketing content in advance to share with new or existing clients. If you wish to quote directly or reuse our content or analysis, please contact us so that we can arrange the necessary license for you.

Last week’s awareness content covered:

Endometriosis and Insurance as March is Endometriosis month.

Also, recognising that we have several cancer related awareness events Amanda Newman Smith addressed the thorny subject of Should cancer survivors have the right to be forgotten?   

As it is No Smoking day next Wednesday 12th we looked at E-Cigarettes and Insurance: Is It Time for a New Perspective? You may find this particularly enlightening as our doctors are challenging the justification for insurers current approach to vaping. Essentially, the medical evidence does not support the loadings that are being applied. This suggests there may be interesting issues for insurers in the context of Consumer Duty.

Also it is World Kidney this Thursday the 13th March, so we looked at how is kidney disease covered in critical illness plans and what preventative benefits do insurers offer?

Another important part of our new services in 2025 is an increased focus on training and sales skills from outstanding external trainers like Matt Chapman and Gary Waters and from our own team. Last week Gary wrote a great piece on Why Regular Reviews are Essential for Your Clients’ Protection Plans

While a long term friend of Protection Guru, Setul Mehta made his debut as a writer for us asking Are You Losing Clients by Ignoring Social Media?

In addition, we highlighted the dedicated training sessions Jason Coleman is running every Thursday focusing on four different subjects.

The next events are:

Thursday 13th March 11am-12pm – Providing Life Protection advice for Mortgage and Wealth Management advisers

Thursday 20th March 11am-12pm – Selecting the best value Critical Illness plans for your clients

Thursday 27th March 11am–12pm – Exploring Income Protection advice

Thursday 3rd April 11am-12pm – The importance of regular reviews and how to compare legacy products

You can register for any of these session from this link.

Participating in the above can also qualify you for a 60-day free trial of Protection Guru Pro* and each session qualifies for 60 minutes structur

As a reminder of how important this is, it is really worth reading Kate Morley’s recent piece on the subject in the Daily Telegraphed CPD.

In addition next Thursday we are running a special Protection Forum with the Consumer Duty Alliance on Using Cashflow Planning to highlight Protection Needs

The learning objectives for this session, which will attract 90 minutes CPD are:

1. Understand why every financial plan can potentially fail if income is not protected.
2. Explore how cash flow planning can be used to clearly identify the impact of a loss of income or bereavement.
3. Recognise how cashflow planning can be used to define the necessary cover and sums assured needed.

You can register to participate by clicking on the link above.

Given paying claims is the most important part of our industry, we also took the opportunity to look at some early claim statistics from HSBC and MetLife in our piece How Fast Are Your Clients’ Claims Paid? The Insurers Leading the Way in Quick Payouts and High Approval Rates.

A further part of our 2025 focus is working with those insurers who are supporting Protection Guru providing objective analysis of their products, particularly where they have exceptional product features or other parts of their proposition, hence last week we shared Why we like Vitality’s Income Protection Earnings Guarantee – Protection Guru and Why We Like Royal London’s Dual Life cover

At this point, may I ask you for some help, If you find Protection Guru a valuable resource to assist with your protection knowledge and discussions, please tell your insurer BDMs and other contacts that you use and ask them if their own company is supporting our work.

We want to continue to keep Protection Guru as a free resource for all advisers and including all providers but if insurers do not make their contribution, we may not be able to do so indefinitely. If that continues, we might regrettably have to introduce subscriptions for adviser to use what is currently a free service. BDMs themselves may want to be asking their own management teams if they are still supporting Protection Guru and if they are not, how are they supposed to explain that to advisers?

Personally, I had a fascinating week as I was in Dallas for the annual T3 – Technology Tools for Today conference. This brings together over 100 US advice technology vendors and in the region of 1000 delegates it’s a tremendous environment where there is a vast amount of thought leadership as well as some great technology being demonstrated.

I will be writing more about this incoming weeks, a couple of the major highlights of the show were both James Dean, Gen AI specialist and financial services lead at Google, and Amy Young, partnerships rainmaker and managing director Financial industry advisory at Microsoft, outlining their respective AI strategies for the financial advice market. When you see how seriously these two tech giants are taking financial services as part of their AI strategy, it really brings home the extent of the transformation we can expect to see very soon in financial advice.

This trip to the US coincided with our AdviserSoftware.com team launching a new service to support advisers in the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and soon Dubai with understanding which AI tools can best help them increase the efficiency and productivity of their firms. Our Adviser AI Tools Assessment Framework compares 14 different adviser AI services and explores the functionality of each compared with the others and with individual analysis of each tool. Advisers can access this research for free at AdviserSoftware.com but you do need to register with us to be able to login to see the full detail.

If Data Governance is important to you, or indeed you would like to understand more about the latest regulations and how good Data Governance can increase the value of your firm, our AdviserSoftware.com team is holding a webinar at noon tomorrow Tuesdays 11^th March on Key things you need to know about Data Governance.  

The learning objectives for this session are:

1. Understand key issues in the context of data protection and data security including those that do not directly apply to the UK, including DORA and FIPA.
2. Best Practice in relation to the data government.
3. The current state of data cleanliness and governance across the adviser market.
4. Why it’s essential to be able to have your data in best possible order, in order to leverage the benefits of the next generation of AI (from Microsoft and others).
5. The impact of data governance on the commercial value of advice businesses.

Have a great week everybody and hope to see you on at least one of our webinar sessions highlighted above, or ideally both, during this week.

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