Hi everyone and welcome to this week’s protection update.
I’ve had a couple of weeks away in the sun and I’ve come back to a mountain of emails and phone messages that I’m still wading through so I’m going to cut to the chase and I want to start by giving a big thanks to our 2x guest speakers who hosted the Friday protection update in my absence.
2 weeks ago we had Antoinette Rizzi from Vitality who talked about Five ways to keep your client happy and healthy this summer. I think it was a really good podcast with practical ideas and if you didn’t tune into it; I’ve added a link to this week’s protection update.
And Mark Godding from Aegon hosted the protection update last Friday and talked about the business protection opportunities. Mark has a perfect voice for a podcast and again, I’ve added it to this week’s protection update so please take a look if you missed either of these…
Income Protection Champion competition 2022
Now you might remember I announced a new competition for our network where we are going to present an award at our NTE in October for our Income Protection champion.
We’re running this competition because as an industry and as a network, we need to do better when it comes to making sure that people’s incomes are protected should they lose their income due to accident or sickness.
We do fantastically well at Critical Illness Cover and Life Assurance.
Well, here’s a statistic I heard this week which surprised me.
Well did you know…
That according to the ABI (the Association of British Insurers) over 27,000 income protection claims paid last year.
That’s actually 11,000 more than there were Critical Illness Claims paid during the same period.
You’ve probably heard me say this before but people find themselves off work sick for a number of different reasons.
Sometimes it minor and they aren’t off very long.
Sometimes it takes a bit longer for them to return to work.
Sometimes, people are off for a while and there’s a point when their employer stops paying them.
And you know… some people go off work sick and never return to work.
That is the reality so I would love it if we can diversify what we do when we make our recommendations.
Income Protection is affordable nowadays and there is a solution for virtually every type of situation.
It definitely doesn’t need to be expensive – take a look at the podcast I recorded with Carl Heard from LV a few months ago (it’s on the protection podcast page).
I’ve only just returned to work and I’m still catching up but I’ll give you an update on how everyone is doing next week but I can tell you the needle is moving and we do seem to be writing more income protection which is great news.
Now on this subject, I have had a challenge…
Let’s remind ourselves of what Income Protection does as a product.
When someone has an accident, sickness, loses their income, the insurance policy pays them a benefit.
There is another product that does this…
It’s not pure protection, but it’s the general insurance equivalent to income protection, ASU. Or it could be just AS – Accident and Sickness Cover.
Now Amy Wilson will be making an announcement soon about some upgrades to our ASU panel so watch this space.
But what I can announce right now is that we are going to add an extra category in our Income Protection Champion competition to recognize the adviser who writes the most amount of Accident, Sickness general insurance within the network.
No, they aren’t the same products, but they do serve a similar aim and as such; we don’t want to get to October and not recognize achievements in that space.
Webinars on the horizon.
I do have a bunch of webinars on the horizon and you’ve got the opportunity to pick and choose what’s right for you.
In August – just a few weeks’ time; we will be running our Critical Illness – Under the Bonnet webinars.
Remember, we’ve got that offer available to you that allows you to take a good look at CIExpert for just £10 per month.
We’ve got 2x of those webinars running in August and we’re asking providers to get into some of the technical detail of what makes the difference when it comes to the things that people get diagnosed with and how having the right type of protection policy can really help in a claim situation.
We’ve also got a couple of Business Protection Webinars we’re running with Aegon, the Business Protection specialists.
They will be 2x of those and they will be different. One focusing on Shareholder Protection and the other focusing on something which isn’t strictly business protection; Relevant Life.
And in September, I’ll be running another ‘Let’s talk about Protection’ session. This one doesn’t have any providers. It’s just you and me and we’re going to talk about protection. This one will have a technology related theme and I think its going to be good to debate some of these ideas – all sales focused and things which will help you become even more successful.
And for those of you down in the south east of England we’ve not forgotten about that roadshow we had to postpone due to the train strikes. It’s happening on Tuesday 6th September at the HSBC tower in Canary Wharf.
I’ve added registration links to all of these events so please just click and register.
And finally, I just wanted to mention a new article that went live last week in Protection Guru.
It’s all about indexation and it’s a really good analysis of exactly who does what on the marketplace.
It shows the measure that each provider uses to measure inflation. They don’t all use RPI!
And probably more importantly, it shows the situation right now in terms of the what each of the providers are charging when those increases to the cover are applied. Again, they are not all the same and there is quite a span of difference between them all.
They’ve also added a link to my calculator, but I’m going to get into a bit more of that detail next week.
So that’s it from me for another week.
Have a great weekend everyone – hopefully we get some decent weather – not too hot, not too cold?
See you soon,
