The Intermediary – July 2025 - Flipbook - Page 58
P RO T E C T I O N
Opinion
Optimised journey:
It’s about more
than just speed
A
dvisers understand
that by embedding a
conversation about
home insurance into
the mortgage advice
process, they can
improve client outcomes, enhance
both the service they provide and their
revenue growth, and drive greater
customer retention.
The ability to achieve all these
outcomes, however, hinges on several
things. How the general insurance (GI)
recommendation has been positioned
with the client, the efficiency of the
quote journey, and the accuracy of the
quote itself are all vital.
Over the past few years, our
research has shown that around 50%
of advisers have reported occasionally
missing opportunities to sell GI, and
we want our tech enhancements to
help address this – helping advisers
to offer more quotes while beer
protecting their clients.
Too oen in financial services, we
see quote optimisation becoming
about the pursuit of speed alone.
Focusing on quicker quotes, offers
and decisions. But an effective
journey is about so much more than
that. Yes, let’s make the journey as
slick as possible, but it needs to be
an intelligent, carefully considered
approach to make sure it’s actually
delivering good outcomes.
This means asking the right
questions, not the fewest. When
we’ve asked the question directly in
our Adviser Survey, advisers told us
overwhelmingly that they would
prioritise a more accurate quote over a
faster one.
In recent years, we’ve worked
hard to refine our quote journeys to
ensure they’re meeting the needs of
advisers and end customers alike,
as this ultimately aids us in our
58
The Intermediary | July 2025
ambition to ensure that every home
is fully protected. We started with the
refinement of our home insurance
quote journey and integrating with
third-party data providers such as
LexisNexis Risk Solutions to prepopulate certain data, resulting in
advisers being able to generate quotes
in under a minute.
Having seen the impact that our
improved home insurance quote
process has made for advisers, we
rolled it out across our other products,
with Landlord’s Insurance and more
recently our Mortgage Protection
offering following suit.
The right price
But we’ve gone further than just timesaving enhancements by analysing
our data and listening to feedback
from our distributors. This has helped
us to refine our question set to ensure
more customers receive the right price
for them.
A recent example has been
streamlining the options we present
when it comes to build type to
maximise the number of returned
quotes. In collaboration with our
underwriters we’ve removed the
‘bricks over timber’ build type option,
which means for properties with
a timber frame and brick exterior,
advisers can simply select ‘brick’ as the
response option, since it’s effectively a
standard build type.
Around 53% of homebuyers are
looking to purchase a new-build
property, according to the Mortgage
Advice Bureau – many of which will
be built via a ‘bricks over timber’
model – so making this particular
change ensures that risks can be
quoted more effectively, reduces the
risk of a quote being wrongly declined
and therefore removes a point of
frustration for advisers.
LOUISE PENGELLY
is director of proposition
at Paymentshield
We’ve also upgraded functionality
and navigation to make it significantly
easier for advisers to review and adjust
quote details in the Adviser Hub.
While we always champion an
advised conversation when it comes
to home insurance, we know that
sometimes consumers prefer to be
directed towards an online journey
where they can complete the purchase
in their own time.
This is why we launched a
supplementary part of our referral
service last year, which provides the
option of an immediate automated
quote which can be sent digitally to
clients via email or text, for them to
complete themselves. This empowers
advisers who are time poor or don’t
have GI permissions, but still want
to ensure their clients can access
quality protection.
Since launch, this journey has also
undergone a refresh to make it quicker
and easier for customers to obtain a
quote. This includes a more intuitive
step-by-step process, a reduction in the
number of fields required, and a more
accessible, user-friendly interface to
provide a smoother, faster quote from
start to finish.
In addition to our large-scale surveys
with advisers, we conduct regular
user-experience focus groups with
advisers to ascertain how our platform
can be made more user-friendly.
We’re confident that we’ve currently
got the balance right between speed,
accuracy and quotability across
our quote journeys, but we will
continue to listen and evolve in
line with advisers’ changing needs
and experiences. ●
