The Intermediary – October 2026 - Flipbook - Page 75
P RO T E C T I O N
Opinion
Doing GI is one
thing, optimising
it is another
E
xperience counts for
a lot in the mortgage
industry, but years do
not necessarily tell us
the full story. When
it comes to general
insurance (GI), firms can differ
significantly in how their approach
has developed over time.
Paymentshield’s latest Adviser
Survey, conducted with 461 financial
advisers in May and June 2026, found
that many advisers have considerable
years of experience writing GI, with
28% saying they’ve been having GI
conversations for 10 years or more. Yet
59% still believe their GI process could
be improved.
If you have been discussing GI for a
decade, you’ll already understand the
important role it can play, and you
are also likely to have an established
approach for introducing it to clients.
But having a process and working
towards fully optimising it to make
sure it drives the best possible results
are two different things.
There is no ‘right way’ to do this,
it’s about understanding what works
best for your business and shaping a
GI journey that feels natural for your
advisers, is effective with your clients,
and ultimately helps you drive the
most positive outcomes.
Look beyond
The number of GI conversations is
an obvious measure of activity, but
this does not tell you whether the
process is working well. How many
conversations result in a policy? How
well are those policies retained? Are
existing customers being reviewed
at the right points? How much GI
income is the business generating? Is
performance changing over time?
That level of visibility is probably
more commonplace within larger
firms than it is across the whole
adviser market, but you do not need to
be a national network to start treating
GI data as useful information.
Technology has made accessing that
data much easier. Paymentshield’s
Adviser Hub, for example, gives
advisers visibility of areas including
quotes, submissions, conversion,
renewals, cancellations and retention.
The value is not simply in having
access, but in using it to spot gaps and
decide what to change.
Tools earn their place
The same applies during the client
conversation. Advisers have more
technology at their disposal than they
did 10 years ago, so an established GI
process should not look the same today
as it did when it was first introduced.
Comparison tools can help make the
conversation more tangible.
Defaqto Compare, for example,
allows advisers to provide an in-depth
comparison of different products in
the market, providing an independent
point of comparison that can help
clients understand the features and
benefits they are considering and trust
the process more.
After the sale
Another mark of a firm working
towards optimising its approach to
GI is what happens once the initial
transaction is complete.
Our research has already shown
there is oen room for greater
proactivity here – more than a quarter
of advisers (28%) say they only revisit
a client’s GI needs when that client
asks them to, while 25% rarely or
never discuss GI with remortgage and
product transfer clients.
For firms that have established a
consistent GI process, those should
be known touchpoints rather than
NASAR HUSSAIN
is associate director of
intermediated household
at Paymentshield
chance encounters. That might
mean diarising relevant points
in the customer journey, having
communications prepared to support
renewal or remortgage conversations,
and making sure longer-standing
clients do not gradually disappear
from view while aention naturally
moves towards new business.
The goal is consistency, leading
to a well embedded process that
supports advisers in having the right
conversations at the right points
throughout the customer journey.
Good, better
There is also a cultural element to
this: where one adviser has developed
a particularly effective way of
introducing GI, using technology or
handling a common objection, is that
being shared? Do firms know who
is performing particularly well and
why? The more mature the business
becomes, the more valuable it is to
turn individual good practice into
organisational good practice.
This is perhaps why the 59% figure
should not be viewed negatively.
Recognising that a process could
be improved could be a sign that a
business is taking it seriously.
Equally, we should not assume that
everyone outside that 59% has reached
the end of the road. There is a wide
gap between having a functioning
GI process and having one that is
fully embedded, measured and
continually refined.
For advisers who have been doing
GI for years, the next opportunity
may therefore have very lile to do
with doing more, but instead be about
doing what they already do, beer. ●
October 2026 | The Intermediary
73
