- Protection Guru Pro provides analysis for income protection, critical illness, mortgage protection and other types of term contract
- Service designed to identify better customer outcomes, supporting the new FCA Consumer Duty requirements
- Enables advisers to easily identify the best quality protection product within the client’s budget
- Detailed report provides comprehensive compliance record justifying product selection, with express and bespoke options available
- Aims to help reverse the decline in protection advice post RDR and MMR
The cheapest products in life rarely represent best value. Better quality protection policies are frequently available for just a few pennies or pounds more, but detailed analysis can be necessary to identify what represents best value for each individual client.
With this in mind, Protection Guru is launching a new service – Protection Guru Pro – that will enable advisers to generate detailed comparisons and recommendations in just a few minutes. It will also help deliver significantly better consumer outcomes, helping advisers focus on value, as required by the new FCA Consumer Duty obligations.
To meet Financial Ombudsman requirements, advisers recommending anything but the lowest cost protection products must clearly document the reason for their recommendation. In addition to helping advisers carry out detailed analysis quickly, Protection Guru Pro will enable advisers to clearly show how they have met these obligations.
The number of wealth and mortgage advisers recommending protection products has significantly declined since RDR (Retail Distribution Review) and MMR (Mortgage Market Review). ProtectionGuruPro.co.uk will not only help protection specialists, but also advisers for whom protection is only part of their business, giving protection advice quickly, whilst being confident that they have carried out a detailed analysis on product features as well as price.
The system has been designed to enable the adviser to refine the product selection process and identify the most comprehensive cover within the client’s budget and at the same time identify both the cheapest and the best quality plans.
Recognising advisers frequently have very little time to prepare detailed analysis, the tool includes both express and bespoke options to product analysis. The former has the ability for the advice firm to pre-configure priorities for different demographics to accelerate research delivery.
Adam Higgs, Head of Research at Protection Guru, commented: “Insurers now provide a wide range of products aimed at different types of clients and offer far more tailored solutions than ever before. Whilst this is a positive market development, it does present a big issue for many advisers as there are so many product options to make sense of. Understanding the differences from product to product is very difficult. Protection Guru Pro has been built specifically with this in mind and will help advisers not only focus on the products that are relevant for their client but also quickly and easily compare them based on the unique requirements of their client.”
Protection Guru founder, Ian McKenna, added: “Invariably advisers want to find the best value product for clients but historically that has meant advisers have had to do a lot of manual research. While for many years insurers have been seeking to innovate and differentiate their products by quality, the overwhelming majority of comparison services focus on price, and even those that look wider tend to just cover individual products or have limited data. By bringing together all our extensive research, and combined with price comparison data, we can enable all advisers to generate a comprehensive protection advice quickly and easily.
“We believe this is a key step in achieving Protection Guru’s overall aim of helping grow the number of families protected in the UK.”
Commenting on the launch of this new service, Charly Higman, Mortgage and Protection Director at Trusted Financial Advice Group, said: “Over the last three years Protection Guru has established itself as the foremost source of detailed technical information for Protection Advisers. That they have now built this into a service that enables us to quickly produce comprehensive analysis, recognising both price and quality, is an enormous step forward and will be a huge benefit to advisers and their clients.”
ProtectionGuruPro.co.uk will formally launch later in May 2022 and will be free of charge to advisers until 31 August 2022, after which point the service will cost £40+VAT per month, per use. HSBC Life has sponsored the product until the end of August, giving advisers plenty of time to evaluate the new service and demonstrating its support for independent advice*. Quotations in the initial version of the service will be provided by iPipeline and, after agreeing with the client the contract they intend to proceed with, ProtectionGuruPro users can then submit applications electronically via iPipeline.
