First Complete, part of the LSL Property Services Group, has grown its protection completions with a 34% uplift year-on-year, driven by strong jargon-free client communication and adviser education.
First Complete provided cover worth over £1.13bn, which is a 34% increase to June 2016 in six months to hit 31,414 protection policies agreed.
Mortgage completions also rose 53% to close to £2.7bn over the period driven by First Complete’s rising adviser numbers to 800 Appointed Representatives (ARs) and 1260 Registered Individuals (RIs) including estate agency.
Toni Smith, sales operations director at First Complete, said: “We’ve been doing the same as we’ve always done. We think it’s fundamentally wrong to have a conversation with a customer without discussing protection.”
First Complete supports a mix of protection-only, mortgage-only and ARs happy to advise on both products.
Smith said: “It’s hard to overestimate the immense financial impact that death, serious illness, injury or unemployment have on families every day. Time and time again we hear stories of households who, unfortunately, cannot survive financially when they have unexpectedly lost their income through such unforeseen circumstances. When the worst happens, protection puts money into client’s hands helping to support them through difficult circumstances. As such, it is fantastic to see strong growth in our network’s protection completions, growing significantly year-on year.”
Last month, First Complete, part of LSL, urged the industry to unite and work harder to drive uptake on protection.
On the Habito announcement yesterday that it had launched an adviser-free mortgage offering and Santander’s 30-minute online remortgage, Smith said these kinds of direct to consumer channels are no threat to advisers.
“Any lender should be delivering this kind of technological advance for consumers, but what I’d really like to see is them delivering these advances to service brokers,” said Smith.
On Habito, she said: “My concern would be that lots of consumers don’t know there are plenty of intermediary-only mortgage lenders who can only be accessed via intermediaries. Customers need educating on a much wider panel and I certainly don’t think portals like this would look after the consumer’s protection needs either.”
