Look for a long-term link-up for protection sales
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Long-term investment and savings products such as pensions represent the ideal opportunity for a link-up with simple protection sales, says Pacific Life Re.
Speaking at the Medicals Direct Panorama conference in Dorking last week, chief underwriter Warren Copp proposed linking mid to long-term investment products with simple protection policies offering guaranteed acceptance.
He said: “People buy lots of products with a medium to long-term view. Those kinds of purchases are potentially quite powerful proxies for good health. In other words, you do not typically choose to put money in a personal pension if you are intending to die any time soon. This should give us really good opportunities to link the two things up.
“When a customer is making an investment with a long-term view, insurers should be much sharper at linking that into a simple protection sale.”
Copp argued that for the idea to work, the protection policies would need to have “instant underwriting”, along the lines of the automatic acceptance seen in the payment protection insurance market.
CBK Colchester director Peter Chadborn says the concept is logical and says that advisers often overlook selling protection on the basis of long-term financial planning goals.
But he believes it is unlikely that advisers would adopt linked protection sales on an automatic acceptance basis because, as with the PPI market, exclusions would apply.
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