The Protection Guru Awards 2022 and everything else we covered last week

I’d like to start today’s weekly round-up by congratulating Christine Husbands of RedArc, who on Thursday last week was presented with the Barnard Award by Scottish Widows. The award gives recognition to an individual who has shown the same commitment and passion to protection as Dr Marius Barnard (the founder of critical illness cover) and Christine was certainly a worthy recipient.

There’s been plenty to keep us busy at Protection Guru over the last few weeks. Aside from all of the usual industry activity, at the end of May we officially launched ProtectionGuruPro and the big news last week is that the Protection Guru Awards are back. The 2022 awards ceremony, drinks reception and lunch will be held on Friday 7^th October, at a venue in London.

After a successful inaugural event in 2021, with some fantastic winners across a diverse and innovative range of categories, we are keen to once again give recognition to both advisers and insurers that are leading the way for the protection industry and helping to drive better consumer outcomes.

There are four overall award categories, for individual advisers, adviser firms and networks and insurers, as well as our Prestige Awards. Once again, we’ve tried to do things a little different with our sub-categories, for example by giving recognition to individuals that are using social media to engage with consumers, adviser firms that lead the way in marketing protection insurance or new entrants to the market that are already making a big impact.

This year, for our adviser categories, we’ll be taking nominations as well as submissions. So if there’s an individual or firm that you feel deserves recognition, you can submit their details to us.

The winners inmost of our insurer categories will once again be decided by adviser votes, with no written submissions or judging. We have also added two new insurer awards this year, which are submission or nomination based, focusing on the best use of social media by an insurer and BDM.

Amongst the sub-categories in our Prestige Awards, our ‘Doctors Award’ will award a new product development or innovation from the last 12 months, that leads to better client health/protection outcomes. We will also once again be recognising an individual who has shown true dedication to protection and helped drive the industry forward and ensure more individuals and families are protected.

We’ve already had a number of excellent entries and advisers casting their votes in the insurer awards. The deadline for submissions, nominations and voting is 31/08/2022. Follow the links below to find out more:

Prestige Awards

Turning to our regular Protection Guru content, we started the week on Monday with news from British Friendly of an update to their BFS Protection income protection product. Our insight provided detailed information on the changes, which included the introduction of an optional guaranteed premium, a new sick pay guarantee for certain occupations  and minimum benefit guarantee. There were also some lesser, but equally important alterations to the product, including a reduction in the maximum entry age and maximum benefit amount.

Tuesday’s insight covered the first session of our June Protection Forum, where we heard from Tom Baigrie of Life Search (amongst others) on the standards, practices and behaviours of protection intermediaries. Whilst Tom’s focus has mostly been on non-advised intermediaries, the issues he highlighted are of importance for the whole industry and the transcript and content is well worth reading/listening to. Watch out for the output content from the second session this week.

On Wednesday was highlighted another issue facing advisers and something that drove many of our development decisions with ProtectionGuruPro: how can advisers identify the right products and features for their clients needs? Our insight examined this issue in more detail and how ProtectionGuruPro can be a big help in producing the right client policy recommendation.

Ending the week, on Thursday we marked Diabetes Week with an insight examining what protection products and underwriting outcomes are available for clients living with diabetes. Finally, our regular Friday round-up highlighted why income protection insurance is essential, with 5 separate insights covering some of the key benefits and the value of IP.

Wishing everyone a successful week!