CIExpert has announced that Scottish Widows has become the ninth insurer to join its Life & Critical Illness Insight Zones.
The interactive digital dashboard is increasingly used by advisers to help their clients comprehend the key elements of insurers’ life, critical illness, and more recently, income protection plans, within an online resource.
One aspect of the Insight Zone is CIExpert’s view in identifying the main differentiating elements of a plan. The recent Critical Thinking consumer and adviser research carried out by CIExpert showed that advisers place high importance on the availability of annual statements for their clients; 63% of advisers rank importance as 4 or 5, with 5 being the highest level of importance. In response to that, the availability of annual statements is a new feature and shows Scottish Widows as one of the insurers who has already adopted it.
For Scottish Widows, other ‘policy highlights’ such as their Price Lock Promise, Health Lock Guarantee and Advanced Surgery Benefit, are highlighted with the ability to drill down into the detail where required.
Designed around Consumer Duty requirements, the Insight Zones provide advisers with access to key information on all aspects of critical illness and life propositions, in particular to enable advisers to streamline their protection sales and research processes.
The Insight Zones offer advisers a ‘birds-eye’ view of all policy options, including detailed information of condition coverage and payment levels together with sections containing policy information, claims data, limits, product flexibility, GIOs, smoker treatment as well as a new section focusing on annual statements. Every Insight Zone is ‘signed off’ by each of the insurers to ensure the accuracy of the information they contain.
Paul Roberts, proposition & distribution director at CIExpert, said: “We’re delighted to welcome another major insurer – Scottish Widows – to our Life & Critical Illness Insight Zones. The interactive tools and insights available will help both those advisers who are new to protection as well as those who are more experienced, helping to break down the complexities that can exist to make an adviser’s protection journey more seamless and streamlined.
“For example, our Critical Illness Condition Tracer Tool enables advisers to visually compare Scottish Widows’ inclusive and simpler-to-explain approach to condition coverage against all the plans we have available within CIExpert. They can more easily portray the differences between policies to their clients along with an explanation regarding the incidence rates and claims statistics too.
“We’ve worked closely with Scottish Widows to include them but also make the Insight Zones accessible and promote their own sales support tools from within the same single, centralised protection hub and we look forward to developing these with them in the future too.”
Scott Cadger, head of underwriting and claims strategy at Scottish Widows, added: “Consumer Duty requirements are at the heart of advisers’ agendas and having access to CIExpert’s Insight Zones will help them to understand customer journeys and provide better overall outcomes. It’s great to have CIExpert’s analysis of our proposition which brings to life the quality, flexibility, and inclusivity of our plans.”