I once spent a weekend compiling my own proposal form by aggregating every company’s individual question set and wrote to the companies suggesting they take my form and work out an equivalent themselves. None even replied.
That effort was defeated anyway by the introduction of ‘dynamic’ online underwriting that generated yet more questions automatically.
That was 10 years ago.
In between times, data capture forms have swelled to around 40 pages with questions increasingly nuanced. Every company still asks basically the same questions in slightly different ways.
Having always been a fanatic for full disclosure and uberrima fides – which is probably why we’ve never had a claim declined – I find it frustrating that most systems do not allow freestyle inputting of text to convey additional information that might in the future be deemed relevant to a claim.
Many who read this will dismiss me as a technophobe.
I’m not - quite the opposite, in fact. I happily put clients through real-time online underwriting here in our office.
Doing it at their home is another matter, however, and that is where 99 per cent of my protection was sold. Mobile technology can help, sure, but it’s not always practical and the trend toward miniaturisation is a nightmare for those like me who have fingers like sausages.
Recently I attended an industry event where I heard a very interesting presentation by Phil Jeynes of protection platform UnderwriteMe.co.uk, after which I was eager to register as a user.
I was disappointed to find though that Legal & General and Aviva have both failed to get behind its initiative. They are not on this platform, which its website says "brings a single process to quote, compare, underwrite and sell multiple protection products from a range of providers". How short-sighted and arrogant of them.
Meanwhile, neither is doing anything to further the uniform application process which the sector so obviously needs.
UnderwriteMe has done a great job and all credit to it, but a choice sufficiently wide as to meet the regulator’s requirement for independence is not sufficiently wide as to meet mine when the two key players are absent.
Protection providers who have thus far ignored UnderwriteMe are doing the whole protection sector a disservice by snubbing its efforts.
Neil Liversidge is managing director of West Riding Personal Financial Solutions
