Stay Ahead of the Curve: Key Tech Resources and Protection Insights Every Adviser Needs
How can advisers stay on top of the dramatic changes we are seeing both in our industry and the wider society?
I’m now in my 51st year working in the Financial Advice market, and apart from the introduction of financial regulation back in 1987, I see more changes happening than ever before. As you may know my other specialism is advice technology, so this week I want to start by sharing with you a range of resources we put live last week on our sister AdviserSoftware.com site designed to help advisers better service clients, improve operational efficiency, and increase profits in their firms.
If you are a Protection Guru user you are already set up to receive access to our AdviserSoftware.com site, you can just use the same password to access it. If you have 40 minutes, maybe over lunch today, may I encourage you to view my keynote at our recent Empowering Advice Through Technology conference. It will explain
Why Knowledge No Longer = Power and provide insights on things every advice firm should be considering. Please also watch our Battle of the tech demos featuring 15 different advice tech solutions, that demonstrate how they can help you work smarter not harder to improve consumer outcomes, compliance and adviser profitability.
If it’s your responsibility to guide the future of your business, you may want to get tickets from this link to our forthcoming conference Delivering Digital Financial Advice 2nd July – London.
Let me also highlight two other areas that should be useful. Our Adviser AI Tools Assessment Framework provides a summary of different artificial intelligence firms designed to help you run your business more efficiently. The comparison table shows who does what, and you can then also click on the individual logos to be taken to more detailed analysis. All of this is free of charge for advisers.
If you are looking to review any other type of technology in your firm you can visit our Advice Tech Hub. This includes reviews and analysis of over 250 different adviser software systems providing an unparalleled guide to technology to help adviser firms, and again it is all free for advisers to access. I hope these resources are useful as our team work incredibly hard to create them. The site is picking up traction as it has had over 3,300 unique users in the last month. If you have not yet visited, you may be missing out on a great resource.
While the Pure Protection Review is going to be crucial to advisers, not everyone is going to have had the time to read all the detail about it, so click this link to find out more Summary of the key issues in around 500 words.
So far this year we have seen a lot of contract changes around Hospitalisation Benefit, so last week Jason Coleman got stuck into the detail with his piece on “Which Income Protection plans include Hospitalisation Benefit? Lots of insurers earning plaudits here including Cirencester Friendly, Royal London, Vitality and Zurich. This piece warrants a detailed read by anyone giving advice but also designing products for insurers and reinsurers, click the link above to get to the detail.
Also last week, our doctors looked at the detail of Pituitary Tumours: Understanding the World Health Organisation Reclassification and Its Impact on Critical Illness Insurance. This is another great piece for advisers, insurers and reinsurers to read. It explores major changes that really need to be understood by everyone in our industry.
One of the things that differentiates Protection Guru and Protection Guru Pro from other protection research systems is our medical team. One of the very first things doctors are taught at medical school, is how to understand medical research. There is a good reason for this, medical research is not as simple to understand as it may appear to those without medical qualifications. Nurses now get specialist training on how to understand medical research too.
Ask yourself, if you were going to have a medical procedure, who would you want advising you, an eminently qualified team of Harley Street physicians, epidemiologists and consultants? Or people with a great deal of experience in the life insurance market? I know which I would choose.
If you think your clients deserve the benefit of a great team of medical specialists supporting your protection advice you will find our article on How you can compare the quality of Critical Illness plans in minutes well worth a read, you can also sign up for a free training session on the subject and earn a 30 day free trial of Protection Guru Pro for taking part.
At Protection Guru a key part of our role is to help advisers be aware of what they need to know as well as the positive things insurers want to promote about plans. Last week Amanda Newman Smith considered “Why advisers should be careful of using relevant Life Cover for mortgages”
We continue to do all we can to engage more advisers with protection advice Consumer Duty Alliance Protection Forum explored using Cashflow Planning to highlight Protection Needs if you missed it the session is now online.
Protection Guru has always focused on trying to give advisers detailed insight and analysis of key medical conditions and how consumers cover them. These are frequently timed to appear around the various awareness events that publicise these conditions. In a change during the first quarter of 2025, we have tried to produce these in advance of the relevant wider publicity to help advisers create their own marketing and social media content in time for the events. Last Friday we summarised our coverage of
Awareness Days Jan to March – Everything you need to know – Protection Guru.
We always like to spend some of our time looking at what insurers do well and last week it was the turn of Royal London to step into the limelight by looking at their Critical Illness claims process and in particularly how they made a huge difference to one claimant.
Another busy week ahead so have a great time everyone.
