Blog by John Revill, Strategic Account Manager, UnderwriteMe

All the way through the Pandemic, UnderwriteMe has gone out of their way to support all their staff through wellbeing days, funds to set up home offices, additional pay to acknowledge the extra resource being used whilst working at home, support with the transition of working from home and some fun things like regular online quizzes, coffee roulette to try and replicate some form of office chat and most recently online Disco Bingo.

The latter took me out of my comfort zone somewhat as I’m not a natural dancer which will be evident if a video of me taking part in an online dance off with Phil Nash, Director of Sales ever surfaces.  But it was a good release from the working day.

All these things that UnderwriteMe has organised in isolation have a small impact on staff morale and motivation and keeping a spring in our step.  If it was just a one off, it would be positive but short lived.  Put them all together and on a regular basis, the power of these small individual initiatives and events collectively has had a big impact on everyone working at UnderwriteMe.

The power of small incremental process improvements could also be associated with the Protection Platform, another UnderwriteMe creation that allows advisers and clients to better control the protection apply journey by targeting the inefficient and frustrating elements of the process.

Two left feet

I’m sure you’re all fully aware of the frustrations and inefficiencies of the protection apply journey:

• The underwriting journey takes too long
• Having to call multiple insurers for clients disclosures before submitting an application
• Submitting multiple applications to multiple insurers for the same client
• Clients forgetting about their health disclosures until halfway through submitting an application

And whilst in isolation they could individually just cause slight delays, add them all together over a long period and that’s a lot of time that’s being spent on administrative elements.

Just looking at the act of calling multiple insurers to check the likely decisions for a clients health disclosure before submitting an application.  It could take 1-2 hours if you’re calling 8 insurers.  If you had to do this for 10 clients in a month that could be up to 20 hours of time on the phone.  We’ve not even looked at the time it takes to key on multiple applications to multiple insurers online applications or having to repeat the apply journey because a client forgot to mention they had high blood pressure before you started submitting the application with an insurer direct.

Keeping up with the rhythm

With the way the Protection Platform works it means all these frustrations and time inefficiencies are dramatically reduced.

• Because the Protection Platform gives real-time underwritten decisions from 8 insurers it gives you the safety net of not having to repeat the process if a client discloses additional information part way through the application. You’ll get live decisions from all the insurers on the Protection Platform without moving away from the system.
• The fact that there are 8 insurers on one platform it puts you in control of picking and mixing products and insurers for a client by just answering one set of questions.
• The real-time decisions coming back from all the insurers on the Protection Platform frees you up from phoning those insurers and instead getting a decision in a matter of minutes for all the insurers.
• The preferred insurer for your client may come back with the decision such as GPR request. As all the insurers will be giving decisions at the same time, you will get instances where other insurers are able to offer terms without the need for a GPR.  When the most suitable insurer requests further medical information, the Protection Platform may provide an alternative insurer who will offer immediate cover.  This means you can have a more positive conversation with the customer and provide cover there and then.

The results are there to be seen for the advisers and firms that are using the Protection Platform. Some of the largest Protection writers in the UK now use the Protection Platform to complement their existing protection processes, with a total of 267,000 applications being submitted through the platform in 2020, that’s approximately 20% of all Life/CI/IP business in the UK now being submitted this way. *

Uptown funk

All these fixes collectively mean you’ll save time on the protection apply process and potentially more time to discuss the virtues of protection with even more clients.  And maybe a bit of time to brush up on your dancing.

Register for free to save time and improve efficiency; https://www.underwriteme.co.uk/tenet-adviser-registration-form

If you want to see how it works, join a demo sessions which takes place every Thursday at 3.30pm. Sign-up here – www.underwriteme.co.uk/protection-platform-webinars

*Swiss Re Term & Health Watch 2020