ProtectionGuruPro

ProtectionGuruPro delivers fast and easy analysis, enabling advisers to demonstrate the best plan for their clients and meet their Consumer Duty obligations.

What is the problem PGP was designed to solve?

  • The overwhelming majority of consumers select protection plans based on price.
  • Once you have shown a customer price their mind always defaults to that price. Yet there may be significantly better policies available for little more per month.
  • Our process starts with the best quality, looks at the cheapest but also identifies the best quality within the client’s budget which is typically best value.
  • This supports the core objective of consumer duty achieving better value and customer outcomes.

What can PGP offer?

  • Unparalleled data on quality features of protection products and contract small print
  • Unique independent medical assessment of products from specialist qualified clinicians updated regularly to reflect latest changes in NHS practice and medical science
  • Unrivalled Consumer Duty compliance by assessing quality, price and budget side by side which enables a measure of value
  • The ability to deliver consistent, robust and repeatable outcomes across all advisers

This will deliver…

Improved consumer outcomes and increased income

  • We have worked at length to conduct the most exhaustive benchmarking of:
    • Life insurance and mortgage protection,
    • Income protection,
    • Critical illness includes spending over ½ million pound with qualified medical professionals. To review every last
    • full stop and comma of every critical illness policy.
  • In our pilots with Advisers, 85% of people given the choice between the cheapest product and a better product, go for a better product. 12% of consumers prefer the cheapest option and typically 3% of customers are still deciding at any given moment.
  • On average this results in an additional premium of £6.16 per month which even on the lowest commission scales would generate approximately another £140 per policy.
  • After 31st July 2023, Consumer Duty obligations will mean any protection recommendation that doesn’t include an assessment of value i.e. quality does not meet regulatory requirements.
  • We have now provided advisers with the ability to compare existing policies with new plans in the market.

ProtectionGuruPro: CI Definition Analysis

Background:

Recognising that neither financial advisers nor their clients are well placed to understand the detailed medical wording used in Critical Illness insurance policies FTRC initiated research in 2017 to conduct a detailed review of policy wordings, working with medical practitioners and researchers.

FTRC collated every insurer’s CI definitions to present them side-by-side in one document. We decided to focus on the conditions that had been assessed with the claims record of one insurer that had released details of which conditions they had paid claims for in the last three years. This comparison showed that the 56 conditions assessed to date accounted for 99.8% of that insurers claims record.

Our initial analysis was successfully published in November 2017 and has been very positively received by financial advisers and insurers. As a direct result many insurers are now considering how they can improve their policy wordings based on findings. We have committed to extending and updating this research on a regular basis and are now seeking to form a partnership with a suitable medical organisation who could provide the necessary incidence data on an ongoing basis.

Six-monthly review:

When we launched our medical analysis of critical illness conditions we set out to conduct six monthly reviews of the analysis in order to:

  • Review our scoring of each condition against the latest medical advancements
  • Review the incidence data to ensure the latest data is used

The first review was published in July 2018. Through this exercise there are a number of conditions where our scoring of definitions have changed across all products and providers including:

  • Main Cancer definition
  • Carcinoma in situ of the colon or rectum
  • Carcinoma in situ of the vagina
  • Addition of mental illness conditions

Insurers who subscribe to Quality Analyser can speak with us in advance of the publication of the new scoring in order to understand why the scoring for these conditions have changed and the impact this has on their products.

Our medical panel:

  • Dr Adam Hazell

Consultant GP

  • Dr Chris Ireland

Epidemiologist, Royal Cornwall NHS Trust

  • Paediatrician
  • Geriatrician

ProtectionGuruPro: Children's Comparisons

Problem

Insurers offer a wide range of critical illness definitions that the life assured’s children can claim on if diagnosed with and the definition criteria is met. Most of these definitions are based on the adult wordings, however some insurer also offer child specific definitions.

It is extremely difficult for advisers to understand which conditions children are more likely to suffer from and at what age or which insurers definitions are more comprehensive.

To further complicate matters the child specific conditions can be split in 2 types, congenital and childhood. Congenital conditions are diagnosed at birth or during pregnancy and childhood conditions can be diagnosed from 0 onwards.

Where clients are not expecting to have any more children in the future, the congenital CI conditions are not relevant as opposed to clients that do intend to have children in the future.

Solution

FTRC have split conditions into 2 sections, congenital CI and childhood CI, and obtained age banded incidence data for childhood conditions. As there is a high incidence between birth and 1 years of age we have applied a specific 0-1 age banding to highlight this.

We have obtained incidence data per birth for congenital conditions. This highlights the number of diagnosis per 100,000 births. We have not used gender incidence on this as many clients will not know the gender of their child.

Doctors have assessed insurer wordings for children specific conditions. We are using the existing assessments for the adult conditions as it is our understanding that insurers do not change their wordings.

This has been built into QA so advisers can now compare insurers wordings by selecting congenital and/or childhood critical illness definitions.

ProtectionGuruPro: Age Banding

In order to effectively compare insurer critical illness policies on a client by client basis, advisers need to understand:

  1. Which conditions a client is more likely to suffer from throughout the term of the policy.
  2. The comprehensiveness of each insurers definitions compared to each other.

The conditions a client is more likely to suffer from will depend on a number of factors:

  • Age
  • Gender
  • Term of the plan
  • Smoker Status

Advisers without medical training are not equipped to evaluate the likeliness of incidence or apply this to an objective comparison of insurers.

FTRC have obtained age banded incidence data in 5 year bands from 15-19 up to 75-79 for the 15 highest incidence conditions in order to understand which are more prevalent for males or females at different age ranges.

We have built this into QA where we will now capture the clients gender, age, term of the plan and use this to apply an automatic weighting to each condition. This along with our doctors analysis of insurer wordings enables advisers to compare critical illness plans based on the conditions that clients are more likely to suffer from during the term of the plan.

Incidence data on smoking will also be built into the system to deliver a more accurate comparison taking the smoker status into account during the term of a plan (this will follow in a later update).

The above implementation is based on the feedback from previous forum where we discussed two approaches to comparing and being able to produce the data.

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