Protection Update 29th October 2021

Protection Update 29th October

Hi everyone,

I hope you are all keeping well.  It’s Friday 29^th October and this is the protection update.

Let’s get this show back on the road!

Now I’m going to start by talking about some upcoming events that we’ve just announced and these are very special…

Why?

Because they are face to face, back on the road – yes, we’re coming out to see you at our November regional roadshows.

I’ve just recently completed 6 months working for the Right Mortgage & Protection Network and do you know… I’ve not been into the office yet.  I’ve only physically met a handful of the advisers in this network and also not yet had a face-to-face conversation with any of the people I work with apart from a couple of people.

We’ve all had to learn to adapt how we do things over the past 18 months and I do think that there have been lots of positives.  But there have also been a lot of negatives; let’s not kid ourselves.  Covid has been an awful time in our lives and the sooner we can completely put it behind us the better.

As people, we don’t like being told we can’t do something… we can’t go somewhere.  When things are taken away from us it hurts.

I was at the Protection Guru awards last Friday in London and it was a little bit emotional.  Most people in that room hadn’t been out in the past 18 months; all stuck in their little rooms doing zoom meetings.

Our industry is a people business.  People buy from people.  Your clients buy from you.

And we’ve really missed not being able to get together in an actual physical location.

So, we’ve announced 6 regional roadshows and we would love you to come along.  But these are happening soon – in fact week commencing 8^th November we’ll be in Cardiff, Newbury & London.

Week commencing 15^th November we’ll be in Edinburgh, Manchester and Birmingham.

Now obviously, this is my protection update, but those roadshows will not just be about Protection.

We’ll have a Mortgage Lender, a General Insurance Provider and a couple of Protection providers and the themes we’re looking at are social media, focusing on Quality from a protection perspective as well as business growth, lead generation and client retention strategies.

They’re focused on business development ideas and will be good and definitely long overdue.

So, all you need to do is Register.  I’ve added the registration link to each roadshow in this protection update, so please register and we would love to see you there in a couple of weeks.

Don’t forget the biggest event in 2021 – The National Training Event

Yes, it’s going to be great to be back on the road, but of course, don’t forget to register for our NTE – that’s the National Training Event.

We’ve got a really good line up and the production and user experience will be improved from what we had back in May.

Yes, it’s online, but you’ll be able to put your feet up and tune in from the comfort of wherever you happen to be.

I’ve added a registration link to this protection update so please register and let’s see if we can break the record for attendees at what will very hopefully be the last online conference we do.

Breast Cancer Awareness Month

If you pick up any of the industry trade press at the moment, you’ll see it’s breast cancer awareness month.

I think sometimes it’s good to just pause for a moment because there’s always so much going on, it can be difficult to take in when we’re so busy and it sometimes sounds a bit like white noise.

But here’s the thing…

We naturally associate Critical Illness policies with Cancer, don’t we?

But when you look at females; Breast Cancer is overwhelmingly the biggest type of cancer that female policyholders actually claim for.

I think all the 2020 claim stats have now been released and when you look across the various providers, it’s quite eye opening.

Aviva reported that Breast Cancer was ‘by far’ the most common reason for critical illness claims amongst women.  In fact, 42% of all individual critical illness claims made by women were for breast cancer.

That meant Aviva paid out over £63 million pounds to those claimants.

But it didn’t quite stop there in terms of the impact of Breast Cancer because 2 claims were actually made by males.  So, it’s not completely unique to women.

And Aviva also reported that they paid well over £1 million pounds in income protection claims where the reason for claiming was ‘Breast Cancer’.

If we look at another big life company; Royal London.  Their claims guide does break down all the individual types of critical illness claims by type which makes it quite easy to work out some of the numbers.

If you look at their book of claims from 2020, I’ve worked it out that from all the female critical illness claims last year; 58% of them were for Breast Cancer.

There were 284 breast cancer claims in total (1 was for a male).  If you look at the total number of female critical illness claims, it’s 491.  Which if you work it out; that shows significantly more than half of all claims for women are for breast cancer.

It’s a scary subject and these are topics that not many people enjoy talking about, but as I always say… you can’t stop bad things from happening, but you can help fix the finances.  That’s what protection is and it’s worth getting serious sometimes when we’re talking about serious subjects.

Welcome Jamie – The Exeter (Protection Insight Podcast)

Now we’ve been running with the Income Protection theme over these past few weeks.  In fact, since Income Protection Awareness Week which kicked things off back in September.

We’ve been running our own ‘Better Sick Pay Schemes’ workshops which many of you will have attended.

But to supplement that, we’ve been publishing different podcasts.  So, Last week we talked to Carl from LV about their Mortgage and Rent Cover which is a type of Income Protection cover.

The week before, we spoke to John from National Friendly about their Accident Only Income Protection product which is another great new innovation.

This week I caught up with Jamie Page who is our new key contact at the Exeter and we spoke more generically about the need for income protection and some ideas to help you along the way.

So that protection insight podcast is attached to this protection update so please check it out.  But remember, all the other protection podcasts can be found on the adviser site – just click on PROTECTION on the top menu and then scroll down to the bottom to open up the Podcasts and Insights page.

Protection Guru awards

Finally, I wanted to mention the Protection Guru awards.  I went down to London last week and we were shortlisted in a couple of categories, but alas, we did not bring home the trophy.  But even still, to be shortlisted to just 3 for he the best protection network for advice; well, that’s still not bad and it was a great achievement.

But one of our own did win.  So, congratulations to you Karla Edwards.  Relatively new the Right Mortgage and Protection Network, but Karla’s efforts on social media have been noticed and she scooped the award for Best use of Video social media.  Well done!

So that’s it from me for another week.

Don’t forget to register, but have a great weekend and I’ll see you soon.