With clients understanding the importance of protection as part of their mortgage and wider financial planning, we have a platform to review those products regularly and ensure they are still relevant.
We can think more broadly about clients’ needs too.
If a review highlights needs beyond mortgage or protection, then it is in the client’s best interest to refer them for more specialist advice, such as pensions or investments, business protection or later-life lending.
But it is not always easy to give clients the ongoing care they need. It takes a proactive approach and plenty of planning – which is not always possible when you’re busy.
For example, we have supported advisers by setting up an entire team to contact clients regularly on their behalf.
Our client services team checks in with clients, reviews their circumstances and sets up further appointments with advisers to provide a financial review and ongoing advice – helping them to keep that valuable protection in place, or even to make a claim if required.
Rather than thinking in terms of two or five-year fixes, advisers can build these regular touch points, enabling them to stay much closer to clients, meet their needs far better and deliver a much greater service.
So, embedding that protection conversation becomes important not just from a client welfare standpoint, or even a regulatory perspective, but for building loyal clients for life.
John Phillips is chief executive of Just Mortgages and Spicerhaart
