Who featured most on Protection Guru in 2022?

A very Happy New Year and here’s to a positive and rewarding 2023

As always, Protection Guru take the opportunity to look back and review the previous 12 months. 2022 continued to accelerate with momentum across the Protection industry.

Innovation was a key theme for Protection Guru with our esteemed leader Ian McKenna scooping the award for ‘Protection Leader of the Year’ at the Lifesearch awards at the start of 2022.

When handing out the award, Debbie Kennedy of LifeSearch referenced Ian’s work with Protection Guru and said, “Their product news, comparisons and updates are read and used by a great many advisers. They probably do more to improve advice intelligence and standards than any and all insurer communications do put together.” Those words are a huge vindication of all the hard work that the team here at Protection Guru put in under Ian’s leadership.

We were also delighted to be awarded with the Innovation award at the Protection Review 2022 conference in December.

We were shortlisted alongside exceptional innovators in the industry, Aviva, HSBC and Zurich. Kevin Carr, Chief Executive, Protection Review, confirmed that ‘The judges said the dedication of this company to improve advice, intelligence and standards across the industry is vast, with changes made this year being very well received by adviser firms…’

Protection Guru launched PGPro earlier in 2022 – a qualitive comparison tool designed solely to help advisers compare protection products based on the features each individual client deems most important. The solution provides detailed analysis to support advisers selecting the most suitable product based on the quality of cover, cost and the type of cover provided.

We have been piloting PGPro with a number of firms and the overwhelming feedback from advisers confirm that they have now have a simple solution, within a few click enabling clients to go for plans with a higher contribution based on the benefits as well as price. Wit Consumer Duty deadlines looming in July 2023, solutions such as PGPro will be fundamental in meeting those obligations. We have some exciting developments for PGPro that we will announce over the coming weeks.

During the year Protection Guru also launched the cost-of-living crisis hub. This was to help advisers get to grips with the ongoing cost of living crisis and the impact this is having on new and existing protection business, we created pages dedicated to answering the key questions. To obtain more granular and consistent data we went to each insurer with the questions Advisers have been asking, which will be updated in real time in order to help understand what is happening.

We have some exceptional developments taking place throughout 2023 to ensure our pledge to the industry to improve advice, standards and efficiencies continue. And we look forward to sharing these in due course.

We held our inaugural Protection Guru awards – full details of the winners can be found here 2022 Protection Guru Awards – Protection Guru. These were very well received, and we are particularly proud that the accolades went to a very diverse group of industry participants. The 2023 event will be on Friday 6^th October and a number of organisations have already booked tables and sponsorship.

The most popular areas of our site in 2022 were our product ratings, followed by our awards, showcase pages, claims hub, cost of living hub and our learning and development hub,

Looking forward to 2023 the most important issue looming for advisers will be meeting the obligations of Consumer Duty. AMI confirmed on Friday the availability of factsheets that will assist firms to get to grips with the biggest regulatory change in years. We would urge you to seek out the factsheets at Consumer Duty | Association of Mortgage Intermediaries (AMI) (a-m-i.org.uk) – please note you do need to be a member of AMI to access the factsheets.

Protection Guru will continue to highlight and direct firms and advisers on the obligations of Consumer Duty, and this will be a key subject matter at the Protection Forum over the coming months.

The Protection Forum experienced attendance of between 65 -100+ attendees on monthly basis throughout 2022. The momentum continues moving into 2023, with over 130 attendees registered for the Forum on Tuesday 10^th January 2023. It is not too later to register for you place – How can we better engage consumers in 2023 – Join Our January 2023 Protection Forum – Protection Guru.

We recently mapped the split of visitors to Protection Guru between advisers and others and year-to-date, 62% of our page views are from advisers. Upon further research overwhelmingly the advisers who are registered for this service are actively engaged in protection business.

Protection Guru focuses on which insurers are best to help clients with particular needs, so I think it is valuable to look at which companies were featured most in our studies. The results per product type and overall are below.

Last week on ProtectionGuru

We started the week looking back at our December forum ‘Adviser Wishes for 2023‘. If you werent able to attend the session, not to worry, we have the full audio recording available for you.    

We’ve all heard or read about people being diagnosed with a terminal illness, being involved in a fatal accident, or dying ‘before their time’ with the cause of death undisclosed. We may have had a close call ourselves and have a completely different outlook on life as a result. Perhaps we have known someone who was on top of their game one minute and having a heart attack the next. A quick Google search throws up various examples of these things happening to business owners or people in key roles – the sudden death of a local entrepreneur at age 55 and another with an eight-year-old child being diagnosed with a terminal illness, to mention just two. Both were business owners with families to support. Both employed staff who were relying on their jobs to financially support themselves and their dependents. On Wednesday, Amanda set out why managing the impact of a key person’s death is important for businesses.

On Thursday, we highlighted how advisers can identify the right products and features for their clients needs. In the last few years we’ve seen a significant growth in the number of protection products on the market, designed to offer solutions for a variety of client needs and demographics. This has perhaps been most noticeable amongst critical illness products, where it’s now increasingly the norm for insurers to offer a core and enhanced adult offering, alongside a variety of children’s cover options. Within the income protection market too there are now numerous products, including traditional IP plans, non-financially underwritten policies and some separate low start options (from providers such as Legal & General).

We ended the week on Protection Guru reminding our readers of the upcoming Protection Forum tomorrow, ‘How can we better engage consumers in 2023?‘ In the first session we invite a number of advisers to discuss what both advisers and insurers can do to better engage consumers in 2023 both from a new business and existing client perspective. In the second session a number of insurers will provide their views on what they are doing and how the industry could improve communications in 2023.

Have a great week everyone.