News Weekly Roundup: Top Stories You Might Have Missed – 17-03-2025

All you need to know about Zurich’s Income Protection changes, a deeper dive into various areas on Income Protection and everything else on Protection Guru last week 

Income Protection dominated much of our analysis on Protection Guru last week. This started on Tuesday with: 

Zurich revamped their Income Protection product with new guarantees, benefits and NHS-friendly diagnostics after initially being the first to get this detailed to market on Tuesday morning we followed this with Jason Coleman taking a more detailed look at their New terms for incapacity in the first year of employment.

Continuing on that Income Protection theme after Zurich and Vitality both had significant recent changes to their offerings, it was a good time to look at Which insurers offer fracture cover and how do they compare?

This also gave us a reason to look at Trauma Benefit: The Lifeline for Income Protection Plans When Life-Altering Injuries Strike. There are only two providers in this sector, do you know who they are? The answer is just a click away at the above link.

Staying with the income theme, Gary Waters came up with a great training piece Beyond savings: The true cost of short-term income protection. Really worth a read.

Also training wise we updated the updated the course dates for our weekly Adding Value to Your Protection Conversations you can register for free training here.   

Finally on the subject of training, Matt Chapman wrote us a great piece on The real fact find: Unlocking customer goals to deliver true value. Let me also point out that Matt is still offering his free Blueprint to Protection Success course plus a massive 60% off his paid for Accelerator course for Protection Guru users. Click on the link above and go to the bottom of the page and you will find the links to both courses and the 60% discount code.

Turning to Critical Illness a couple of weeks ago we had a tremendous Protection Forum with Emma Astley from Cover My Bubble and Karla Edwards from The Protection Parent who were amazing on this session sharing their comprehensive knowledge on Children’s Critical Illness Cover the first part of the recap can be found via this link. If you are an adviser, this session contains great practical insights into issues around this subject that is so important to parents taking out cover. For insurers, there is invaluable information on who is doing things well and what others need to do better. Reviewing this content will be invaluable whatever your role in the industry.

We also took the opportunity last week to look at Critical illness age limits – How do insurers compare?

We are currently giving an increased focus on insurers who do things really well, hence last week we looked at Why We Like Royal London’s Beneficiary Nomination. Lots to be learned by advisers from this analysis.

So that was our Protection Guru content last week, but I should also highlight that the plenary sessions from our Empowering Advice Through Technology conference are now online at AdviserSoftware.com

The first session features Jonathan Stubbs Director Of Risk at Lift Financial (who recently became part of Brooks MacDonald) and Ian Dempsey, The Money Man on What are the key new skill sets advisers need to focus on as AI makes much of their traditional role easier?

Plenary 2 addressed How will AI evolve the role of traditional adviser technology and featured TFAS Enterprises Group Chief Executive Jeff Lange and Sapna Shapero Programme Manager at Chesterton House Financial Planning

Exploring  What does the adviser firm of the future look like was the subject of our third session and  featured Nick Raine Chief Executive Officer Soderberg & Partners (UK), Sarah Roughsedge founder of Eva Wealth Management for Women and  Alan Smith Chief Executive Officer at Capital Asset Management

And finally What are the areas where the industry must do better, and how can we drive change? This featured Tim Thompson Rye award winning former CTO at The Progeny Group, Jon Dear Head of Advisory Services at Hargreaves Lansdown and Ed Dymott Chief Executive at Benchmark Capital

All of these session are outstanding and well worth the time to watch.

Have a brilliant week everyone.