Advisers need to remove any inner bias they may have towards a particular form of protection so that they can do the right thing by their customers.
This is according to Kate Stratton, mortgage services managing director at Home Mortgage Solutions, who also revealed she discovered the impact income protection could have with her very first client.
Stratton spoke about income protection and mortgages on the second day of the Income Protection Taskforce’s Income Protection Awareness Week.
During her session, Stratton revealed that due to some past personal experiences she had valued critical illness (CI) over income protection (IP) and admitted this came across in her conversations with customers.
However, this all changed after she attended a protection masterclass where she learned how to show customers that IP was just as important as critical illness cover.
Stratton explained that while in a first appointment income and outgoings are assessed with clients, advisers tended to only discuss mortgage-related aspects.
And as advisers can only consider realistic options for the sort of property the customer can afford by looking at earnings, Stratton said it was vital that ways of protecting those earnings were discussed.
Consequently, Stratton changed up her own conversations so her first appointment with customers discusses income protection from the off and it remains an underlying theme in future meetings.
“It never really affected my critical illness cover conversations because I still feel completely passionate about that as well so it didn’t have a detrimental effect on my clients one way or the other and in actual fact they realised the importance of both,” Stratton said.
“That was better in a commercial sense but also it was doing the right thing for the customer which is the most important part of the job.”
Real life consequences
And doing the right thing has real life consequences, Stratton added, citing the example of her first ever client, a 23-year-old woman and her partner who had bought their first house together.
Soon after moving in the client revealed she was suffering from a bad knee which her doctor had said was being caused by growing pains.
Stratton suggested she may want to get a second opinion which was part of the insurance package taken out when buying the property.
A few weeks later the client phoned to say that her growing pains were in fact a rare form of bone cancer.
The client spent around a year in hospital but the IP and CI cover the couple had taken out meant he could spend time supporting her at the hospital, the mortgage was being paid and she could spend time on getting better.
This has all meant, Stratton said, that many years later her client has recovered, sold her house, bought another one, has married her partner, has children and her life is much better.
“It just reminds us that we have to do the right thing by our customers as it really does make a huge impact on their lives,” Stratton concluded.
