Insurers talk to advisers about products, but should advisers expect more? Nick Jones thinks they should.
How interesting is protection insurance? Well, the answer depends on your point of view. To many reading this article, protection is a complex and interesting subject for debate, fit for the pub, the golf club or the office. But for many people outside of our industry, this view couldn't be further from the truth - if they knew enough about the topic to form an opinion, that is.
The fact that consumers don't engage with protection products must have a knock-on effect on how insurers should promote and market their products to the people who are selling them: financial advisers.
Let's compare it to a retail purchasing experience. When you go out to buy the latest piece of technology for the home, office or a flat-screen TV for the kitchen, the detail of the product is important.
You haveve made the decision to make a purchase, because you know you have a want or a need to answer; the next step is to choose the right product for you based on specification, cost and probably influenced a little by brand and marketing.
So for the Samsungs and LGs of the world, product and product promotion is important. These two factors will have a massive influence on their success.
But it's another story for the protection industry. Consumers are not that interested in protection, even when they're buying it, so the likelihood of them wanting to carry out a detailed product analysis is limited.
That's no bad thing, in a sense, because what we do is both pretty technical and very important - so it's always better that an expert adviser is chosen to do the analysis.
So should we care about products?
The answer, of course, is yes. It's just as important that protection products are fit-for-purpose as it is for a new flashy printer to be quick and efficient - but have insurers been guilty of focusing too much on the minutiae of product detail to the detriment of some other essential parts of the sales process? We could reasonably conclude that they have.
As an industry, we have a tendency to complicate and over-design product features without tackling some of the more fundamental problems we face.
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