Protection Guru has launched a comparison service to help advisers identify the “best quality” protection product within their client’s budget, rather than simply the cheapest.
In an effort to keep advisers compliant with the Financial Conduct Authority’s incoming focus on better consumer outcomes, the analytical firm will also generate a report “in just a few minutes” for each comparison justifying product selection.
Previously, some time-strapped advisers have felt hesitant to advise beyond price due to the level of evidence needed to justify a more expensive policy, according to the firm.
The new comparison service is, in addition to improving consumer outcomes, intended to “reverse the decline” in protection advice provided following the FCA’s reviews of retail distribution and the mortgage market.
“Invariably advisers want to find the best value product for clients but historically that has meant advisers have had to do a lot of manual research,” said Protection Guru’s founder, Ian McKenna.
“While for many years insurers have been seeking to innovate and differentiate their products by quality, the overwhelming majority of comparison services focus on price, and even those that look wider tend to just cover individual products or have limited data.
“By bringing together all our extensive research, and combined with price comparison data, we can enable all advisers to generate comprehensive protection advice quickly and easily.”
The tool is designed to help protection specialists as well as advisers for whom protection is only part of their business.
Called ‘Protection Guru Pro’, the service predominantly covers income protection, critical illness, and mortgage protection.
It has been designed so advisers can identify the most comprehensive cover within the client’s budget, allowing them to identify both the cheapest and the best quality plans.
Advice firms can also use the tool to pre-configure policy priorities for different demographics of clients.
Protection Guru’s research head, Adam Higgs, said while insurers’ now provided a wider range of products than ever before, this did present a “big issue” for many advisers due to the number of options to make sense of.
“Understanding the differences from product to product is very difficult,” said Higgs. “Protection Guru Pro has been built specifically with this in mind and will help advisers not only focus on the products that are relevant for their client but also quickly and easily compare them based on the unique requirements of their client.”
The comparison service will formally launch later in May 2022 and will be free of charge to advisers until the end of August, after which it will cost advisers around £40 per month to use.
Quotations in the initial version of the service will be provided by iPipeline.
ruby.hinchliffe@ft.com
