Association of Mortgage Intermediaries (AMI) chief executive Robert Sinclair has slammed mortgage advisers for how they approach conversations about protection and criticised them for being too risk and compliance heavy.
Speaking at the Protection Review conference yesterday, Sinclair told delegates about research AMI conducted which showed while 86% of mortgage advisers had talked about protection with customers, just 30% of clients could recall the conversation.
“Mortgage brokers are s*** at having good conversations about protection,” Sinclair said.
“It’s a really strange place. You trust them. You think they could be great at it, but the customers walk away from it thinking ‘nah, didn’t mean anything to me’.
“It doesn’t lodge in their memory at all. That’s not a great place for us to be as an industry.”
Sinclair maintained that while advice is only regulated when advisers recommend a particular solution or product, the sector has been guilty of employing risk and compliance functions too readily.
This has tied advisers up in knots for the past 20 years and prevented them from having decent conversations with customers, he argued.
“We’re not doing this very cleverly,” he added. “We need to rethink the whole landscape about how we get this better.
“Only then when we get the customer nailed into thinking ‘this is the product I need to have a conversation about’ and we give them to a specialist who does it, will we have the right conversations, because then you can build complex products.”