Leadbay sees IFA turf wars

Statistics from the leads provider showed mortgage brokers spend on life assurance leads since January of this year has increased 208 per cent and one in five is now buying life leads whereas a year ago their entire lead purchasing spend went on home loans.

Grant Stevens, managing director of Leadbay, said: "We originally saw it happen in the mortgage market when the credit crunch started. Brokers dealing with prime mortgages thought that they were not affected as only adverse credit was at the time but then they suddenly found competition for new clients getting significantly tougher as adverse brokers moved into the prime arena to keep their businesses going.

"Now we are seeing the shift with mortgage brokers starting to sell products that were originally just dealt with by IFAs.

"We have been selling life assurance leads for almost a year now so it is easy to measure. We also have more and more calls for us to move into other types of leads traditionally the preserve of IFAs such as pensions and other protection leads."

Mr Stevens said new brokers registered since February were spending as much on life assurance leads as they are on mortgage leads and overall spend on life assurance leads had increased in last few months by 32.5 per cent a month.

Keith Richards, group distribution and development director of Tenet, said mortgage IFAs had been diversifying but given the size of the protection gap generalist IFAs should not be too concerned about their home loan counterparts stealing business from them.