Author: System

Simple products and services stand out. It has become a necessity worth striving to achieve in a complex market and within busy mortgage firms across the UK.

Creating Simplicity

So how do you go about achieving simplicity in your business? Simplicity is all about finding the right balance of what is necessary and what is not.

In the past, many advisers preferred to structure their sales process across several face-to-face client appointments. The pandemic forced a move to online meetings, which resulted in much improved efficiencies for both advisers and customers alike with many firms choosing to continue this approach post lockdown. This even led to wider benefits such as being able to return mortgage recommendations within a few hours of the call because of the time savings generated.

This is a great illustration of how simplicity has been created on such a wide scale, despite it being forced on us by a global pandemic. And, importantly, it makes the advisory community stand out.

Hiding complexity to create simplicity

Once you cut through everything in your business that isn’t necessary, the next stage is to look at what is necessary but repetitive.

This is where good technology solutions come into play, effectively hiding the complexity of most repetitive actions (that’s what it’s really good at), so the users only see simplicity.

As an example, Uinsure knew that asking lots of questions to apply for insurance was complex, boring, arduous and sometimes ambiguous. So instead, we decided to shed all the complexity of traditional providers, by only asking the critical questions and sourced the rest of the data from other places. This was a meaningful innovation because it simplified the experience of accessing insurance and hid the complexity to the end user.

In a world full of complexity, it is simplicity that makes a product or a service stand out. It’s therefore crucial that we understand how to balance complexity with simplicity and can implement this understanding in our businesses.

The reality of today’s landscape is your customer is overwhelmed with choice. Brand loyalty is lower than ever and switching to competitors is getting easier and easier – Facebook recently learned this the hard way after it showed negative user growth for the first time ever and lost $250bn dollars of value in the process.

Customer experience (CX) is the most important thing any organisation needs to be obsessing about to compete, grow and even survive. Everything from systems and communications to processes and proposition needs to be created with CX technology at the very heart of the business.

For most of us, we can’t build an entire ecosystem ourselves so choosing the right partners who can integrate seamlessly enabling the CX you want to create for your business is mission critical.

When assessing the market for partners you’ll find two kinds of businesses, on the one hand are those that are largely product siloed and use technology to automate traditional processes. These firms will essentially take the same arduous paper processes customers used to fulfil and digitise them without any thought as to how they will intertwine into the CX you’re developing to accelerate your business.

This is then often supported by sub-standard API integrations making your CX slow, fragmented and clunky – a recipe to send your clients elsewhere.

On the other hand are the true technology companies that have learned the above approach isn’t good enough, nor the way forward, because CX is not being seen as the most important single element of your development. It’s these firms that are focused on coding new solutions and have been able to understand how to embed a culture of customer centricity using technology and data that are outperforming their peers.

So when you’re looking for potential partners, it’s vital to assess if organisations you could partner with for technology, culturally embrace customer centricity principles and place CX at the heart – or is it simply used as a tag line? Culture is the key.

Those that do embed CX culture are the businesses that are led by the engine room, not from the boardroom. It’s the individuals that are on the front-line within an organisation that are experiencing the live customer feedback and are working daily to solve problems, who will not only know where to focus the business but will also often come up with the best solutions and are empowered to make decisions.

The Leadership Team should be there to orchestrate the direction, reward bold thinking and be responsible for setting the boundaries – that is how true customer centricity is achieved.

When firms are choosing their business partners of the future it’s vital to assess who has built customer centricity and not just technology, and who is driven by a talented and trusted empowered team, as they will be the ones thinking outside the box to create progressive solutions that work for your customers.

The year of opportunity

2022 will be a big year in the advisory sector for numerous reasons. It will be one of the biggest years for remortgages ever recorded, with almost £40bn worth expiring in January alone, and new FCA regulations on GI pricing practices come into force meaning price walking will be banned.

Such a large volume of expiring mortgages presents opportunity for obvious reason, and when you consider many of these remortgaging customers will be paying over the odds for their current home insurance policy, in the likely situation they have been subject to price walking, it’s easy to see why 2022 could be the year for advisers to truly reclaim their market share once lost to price comparison sites.

The advisory sector itself will become much more competitively positioned on price as a direct result of the new regulations. Not only that, but Advisers are now also able to offer a quicker, easier and more streamlined insurance application than price comparison websites as well being able to more effectively advise on products that add value and those that don’t.

This means there is not only great opportunity in the short term for the scores of customers remortgaging, but advancements in technology in the intermediary space can be used to help secure the long-term futures of advisory firms, too.

Customer adoption of PCWs

PCWs took huge chunks of market share from Advisers very quickly following their inception in the late 1990s and they now dominate the market.

They became symbols of efficiency, and an example of how technology can be used to find the “best” price for insurance. It was simply unheard of that you could get numerous quotes from different businesses by filling out one form. But what was innovative and more efficient then, is now viewed as long and laborious.

In order to meet the underwriting requirements of all of the dozens of insurers who are providing a quote, the questionnaire home owners need to answer involves anything upwards of 50 questions in a longwinded exam for the consumer.

Innovation in the intermediary sector

Innovation has been prevalent in the intermediary space and, as a result, Advisers have the advantage when it comes to being able to get the best price quickly and conveniently from a range of providers.

Through our platform, for example, you can get a quote from a wide-ranging panel of the UK’s leading insurers by answering just three questions (name, date of birth and postcode), with a full application taking less than a minute. A far cry from lengthy exams that consumers are faced with should they opt for PCWs.

The ace cards of convenience and speed are therefore right back with the Adviser and the opportunities that both mortgage cessation and new regulation bring means the intermediary sector has all the tools it needs to be able to reclaim market share as we head into 2022.

Using technology to help future proof your business

In addition to the huge short-term opportunities, we’re presented with, there is also the chance to capitalise on the innovation we have made as a sector to help change the way future generations purchase insurance.

The next generation of first-time buyers are the most tech-savvy of the lot and are very happy to spend their money with disruptors who offer easy-to-use platforms.

To protect against future losses in market share, just as the opportunity to reclaim from PCWs has hit us, intermediary firms must adopt the technology available to them. That means not only offering tech solutions to a more digitally savvy, Gen-Z and late-millennial audience, but tech solutions that deliver greater value.

Now is the time to integrate technology

Advisers already have a huge head start on PCWs on being able to do this as they know how their client is progressing in their mortgage journey. Holding data such as, ‘mortgage offer received’ or ‘exchange date’ indicates the exact timing of when home insurance is needed. This data is gold dust, yet today we estimate that c.675,000 advised mortgage clients still go outside of the intermediary industry to buy their insurance.

The problem with neglecting general insurance and allowing so many potential customers to end up on price comparison websites means advisory firms are essentially feeding other businesses with a lead flow that have an intention to cross sell into more core product areas, such as mortgages and protection, which is a major reason why market share has been lost across the wider space.

Fortunately, when speaking to Principals and seeing how our partners are operating, we know that the tide is turning on this issue.

In 2022, we’ll see more and more firms using integrated technology that help Advisers properly take advantage of the ‘gold dust’ knowledge they own and with it, insurance will seamlessly integrate into mortgage journeys, so the product is offered at exactly the right time.

And so, looking to next year, now is the time to make the forward-thinking choices on the digital tools you’re going to use to truly seize the opportunity that lies ahead. From an insurance perspective, it is no longer time consuming and stressful and can instead exceed the expectations of existing and prospective clients, helping to reclaim market share.