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The protection options to help your clients – Roxburgh

by: Damian O’Connor, principal of Roxburgh Financial Management
  • 01/11/2017
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The protection options to help your clients – Roxburgh
Damian O’Connor of Roxburgh Financial Management assesses the key changes in the protection market.

There have been many interesting innovations and announcements in protection the last three months. If you’re focused on mortgage sales and protection isn’t your main area of expertise, here are three new tips to help your protection advice efforts.

 

Tech speeding-up applications

VitalityLife has launched two new quick and easy tools to help advisers do business with their clients.
The first is Reality Checker, which helps advisers to highlight the growing need for income protection with a few quick questions about income, savings and outgoings.

The tool produces a brief lifestyle protection report that shows how long the person’s savings would last if they had to stop working, along with their own personalised income protection gap, and supporting statistics around the likelihood of being off work.

Second, Trust Hub makes it quicker and easier to place policies in trust.

It’s integrated with VitalityLife’s Adviser Hub dashboard so advisers can complete the trust process and save documents for later.

All they need to do is enter a plan number to populate the information that’s already known. Clients can also access the Trust Hub without logging in and can self-complete the trust process.

 

Retention incentives

British Friendly is expanding its Mutual Benefits programme with three new initiatives designed to complement members’ income protection cover.

It means they see immediate benefits and value from their policy, even if they don’t claim. These are:

  • A bespoke health cash plan option from £2 per week to claim cashback on health expenses such as dental, optical, prescriptions and specialist consultations;
  • A limited number of health MOTs for members at no extra charge until January 17;
  • A 23% discount on a range of Fitbit devices to kick-start the wellbeing journey and monitor everyday health.

 

Growing the market

Aviva has launched simplified income protection to help customers cover their monthly outgoings if they cannot work due to illness or injury.

Living Costs Protection is a long-term insurance contract with the following features:

  • At the outset, customers select a monthly fixed benefit of between £500 and £1,500;
  • A claim payment period of up to 12 months per claim;
  • There is no limit to the number of claims a customer can make;
  • At claim stage, there is no financial assessment, and no deductions are applied. The customer will receive their selected benefit amount once Aviva has accepted their claim.

The product can provide an alternative solution to customers with fluctuating incomes such as the self-employed and contractors, where the income-based benefit calculation required for traditional income protection at both point of sale and claim can be complex.

In addition, it can provide a more affordable option for those in higher risk occupations.

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