A driving force behind finding a solution to the growing protection gap, Lucy Quinton finds Andy Couchman to be a man whose actions speak louder than his words.
Andy Couchman is highly respected in the industry and is warmly embraced in whichever circle he mixes. Although coming across as quiet and humble, Couchman appears comfortable conversing with anyone in the market. And once someone asks an industry-related question, the sheer depth of his knowledge and understanding just tumbles forth.
Having spent many years in the market, working in a variety of positions - starting out as a trainee underwriter and then moving on to product marketing - Couchman set up his own consultancy firm in 1995 and now divides his time equally between that, editing and publishing.
He says he set up his own business with the direct intention of "being able to make a difference in the industry", however, Couchman admits that one of the traits of owning a consultancy is the business can go through periods of "feast and famine".
Part of the success of his consultancy business is attributed to the stipulation that he would never work for just one company. "A lot of consultancy firms will work for company X for six months and then followed by company Y," he explains.
He enjoys being independent and adds that one of the benefits is that he can set his own agenda, whether he decides to work in one part of the business more than the other or attempt to influence people in one or more organisations.
As part of the indomitable duo of himself and Peter Le Beau who head up the Protection Review each year, it is clear to people in the industry that Couchman relishes the opportunity to compile the annual review. It has grown on a yearly basis and now incorporates a conference and dinner in addition to the review itself. He likes the idea of expanding the review's potential, claiming that the conference is a good opportunity to assess the current state of the industry while the dinner is a perfect opportunity to catch up with people and network.
Le Beau and Couchman have worked together on projects prior to the Protection Review but "always promised each other that there would be a bigger problem that we would work on together". Both decided that one of the things the industry was missing was a book about what the market was up to.
Various other heavyweight figures and organisations in the industry produce reports on the state of the market, but the duo wanted something that was going to "be a bit different, be an annual event and cover the whole of the market". And that is how the idea of creating the review took form.
independent outlook
He says that it has proven to be popular because it is truly independent. "It probably wouldn't look a lot different if it was written by another party, but it would be perceived differently," Couchman adds. Le Beau and Couchman have worked hard to ensure that it is not just their views of the market but that the views of the entire sector are reflected.
Looking at the market in general, there is a feeling emerging that protection is hard work, he admits. Qualifying this, he says one example is that Scottish Widows has taken its policies off the portals recently as it knows it has to do work to its products to give it a competitive edge and that there is no point putting them on there if it does not attract business.
"If we are not careful there is a risk that the whole protection insurance area becomes the poor relation of the financial services arena and that would be more than a pity. It would be bad news because the products that we are involved in are fantastic," he says.
Couchman says it is important not to get too emotional about the subject of protection insurance but that the industry, nevertheless, is in a business where it is providing a product to people for a relatively good price. Income protection is a good example of this, he says, as it will cover people if they have an accident like a motorbike crash, for instance.
He believes that the industry is at an exciting juncture as it is starting to move away from products that are just providing money to witnessing the birth of rehabilitation services such as Red Arc and First Assist. Couchman says that, in the future, people will look at such services as being an integral part of a protection policy.
"The difficulty we have as an industry is that we are not very good at communicating that message. To be honest, it will only have a value once people can see it in action and, in particular, how it works for them. Once that happens, they are then switched on to what the sector is offering and will look at the whole value offering rather than whether one product is 10p cheaper than the next one," he explains.
He applauds the idea of innovation in the market, but is concerned that product designers and their teams do not always look at problems in quite the way that they should do.
He is a firm advocate of the term subrogation - to stand in the shoes of another - and believes that this is what the market should be doing to see what images are coming out of the industry and how that makes people feel.
"A lot of what people see at the moment almost appears to put people off and intimidate them but this is not the business that we think we are in.
"It's a pity because we have some very clever people in the industry. Actuaries by definition have to be clever but they don't have a monopoly on product ideas as we have some great product people in most of the companies and we have great intermediaries with ideas," Couchman says.
Interestingly, he wonders how many companies really listen to what intermediaries want and thinks they should step outside the box and do something different.
There are massive challenges going forward and one of them is that society has concentrated much more on spending than saving over the last few years. "I am an optimist and one of the things the human race is good at when it is faced with a problem is looking at all the different ways of resolving it," he says, adding that one idea is to look at other industries and see how they have restored a sense of balance after a crisis.
contractual obligations
A strong case should be made for a statutory requirement to be implemented where employees should be given an annual statement from their employers of what benefits they get, he believes. If this was a statutory requirement, advisers could see firsthand what employees were receiving rather than their clients thinking that they may receive a benefit when in actual fact they do not, he says.
In addition, Couchman says: "We need to look at areas where we could be politically more astute and product areas where we should assess whether there are gaps."
There is no one thing that Couchman thinks will fix the protection gap but he adds that the industry really does need to make sure that protection is on the agenda.
While the future state of the industry lurches from one hurdle to the next, one thing that does remain certain is that when the likes of Couchman are around, there can be no uncertainty that protection will remain on the agenda. n
