Tag: Thought Leadership

The rise of the “Now Economy” has led to an increase in consumer expectations for quick and effortless transactions. If you’re a financial adviser, you sit at the cross section of a colossal data exchange between multiple parties, which puts you in a prime position to respond to these changing expectations. The key is to understand how to use this data and choose the right partners, so you can adapt your business to give your clients what they want and expect.

So what should you focus on first? Here are some strategies that your firm can use to succeed in this environment:

1. Communicate relevantly: With all the marketing and spam flooding our inboxes and text messages, it’s important to send targeted, relevant messages that your clients will read and act on. Using data to send timely, relevant communications about mortgage applications, insurance renewals, and other financial products can increase conversions. For example, you can use data to send automated personalized emails reminding clients when their insurance policy is due for renewal or when their fixed rate is coming to an end.
2. Use an omni-channel approach: Different generations and demographics have different preferences for communication channels, so it’s important to reach customers through a variety of platforms. SMS and WhatsApp are becoming increasingly popular for quick updates and have higher open and click-through rates than other forms of communication.
3. Utilise technology to streamline processes: Automating tedious tasks can help financial services businesses provide a more efficient and seamless customer experience. By using data and choosing the right partners, businesses can make purchases such as home insurance effortless for consumers.
4. Offer flexible payment options: In the “Now Economy”, consumers expect to pay for goods and services using a variety of payment methods. Offer options such as credit and debit cards, mobile payments, and online payment platforms to make it convenient for your clients to do business with you.
5. Foster trust and transparency: Trust is more important than ever. Make sure to be transparent about your fees and policies and build trust with your clients by providing excellent customer service and being responsive to their needs (which can also be automated).

The biggest bit of advice? Lean on your suppliers and choose partners to do the hard yards. Give them your problems or needs and let them guide you with their expertise. They should be able to help you identify and implement the right technology solutions.

Are you sure you’re as open-minded as you think you are? Most of us like to believe that we’re unbiased, but the reality is that we all have unconscious biases – automatic stereotypes, prejudices and associations that can unconsciously influence our thoughts and actions.

In the business world, these unconscious biases can have a major impact on diversity and inclusion, leading to certain groups getting different opportunities or levels of support.

So, how can you identify and tackle your own unconscious biases? Here are some things to consider:

1. Do you tend to surround yourself with people who are like you? It’s natural to feel more comfortable around those who share similar backgrounds, experiences, or interests. But be aware that this comfort zone can also prevent you from being exposed to diverse perspectives and experiences.

2. Do you catch yourself making assumptions about people based on their appearance or background? We all have preconceived notions about different groups of people, whether it’s based on race, gender, age, or something else. Even though these thoughts might just occur in our heads, take a moment to consciously admit it and think about where these assumptions come from and whether they’re fair or accurate.

3. Are you actively working to challenge and overcome your biases? It’s not enough to simply recognise your biases – you need to put in the effort to actively challenge and overcome them. This can involve seeking out diverse perspectives, having difficult conversations, or simply considering an alternative point of view.

4. Are you creating an inclusive environment? Finally, think about your role in creating an inclusive environment for those around you. Do you actively listen to and value the perspectives of others, regardless of their background? Do you try to be welcoming and supportive of all employees, regardless of their differences?

By asking yourself these questions, you can start to identify and address your own unconscious biases. This is an ongoing process that requires a commitment to learning and growth. But by being mindful of your biases and actively working to overcome them, you can play a part in creating a more diverse and inclusive workplace.

So, what exactly is embedded insurance and why should any mortgage businesses care? 

Embedded insurance simply means insurance that is integrated with a product or service into an existing customer journey. Therefore, the consumer is offered the right insurance for a product or service directly during the purchasing process.

For example, you book your all-inclusive summer holiday online and its convenient to add travel insurance as it’s offered as a booking option. Embedded insurance makes this possible.

Eureka! Embedded home insurance alongside a mortgage perhaps?

As you can see, the goal of embedded insurance is to seamlessly integrate insurance into existing purchasing processes to create the best and smoothest buying experience for the customer.

The main reason for considering embedding home insurance in your mortgage process is vast changes in consumer behaviour in recent years. Consumers demand convenience and comfort above all, which means uncomplicated and individual customer journeys in all areas are essential.

It presents a gigantic opportunity for mortgage advisers to capitalise on because it’s within your mortgage advice process that this product becomes a need, and within your data that provides the mechanism to automate and ‘embed’ digital insurance into individual customer journeys.

Is embedded insurance right for your business? Things to consider:

Do you currently offer home insurance consistently to all buyer types e.g. remortgage and purchase customers? 


If you do, and it’s working – great, certainly continue. But if your business isn’t making the most of the insurance opportunity, embedded insurance would deliver this for you.

How good is your data?

Ensuring data quality across your business is such a critical element to be considering, not just for embedded insurance but wider utility as other mortgage related tech advances. Quality data allows your embedded insurance partner to enrich and personalise insurance offerings according to individual customer profiles and preferences. For example, is it a first-time buyer with no current insurance or remortgage customer potentially switching insurance to a new provider? These data points enable deeper personalisation and supercharged customer experiences.

Are you seeking business diversification?

Embedded insurance can serve as an additional revenue stream. By earning commissions from insurance sales, you will diversify income sources and improve overall financial performance. 

Embedded home insurance isn’t just an add-on; it’s a highly effective gateway to providing a comprehensive service. By integrating insurance directly into mortgage journeys, you’re prioritising clients’ needs and seamlessly addressing a very core aspect of homeownership. 

By Martin Schultheiss

CompareTheMarket recently launched a range of online execution-only remortgages with two of the largest lenders in the UK. I’m sure this headline will have grabbed the attention of anyone that leads a mortgage firm and intends to grow their business over coming years and quite rightly so.

In fact, if you log on to any well-known price comparison website, you’ll find that it’s not just insurance products that are part of their overall game plan. Next to the usual compare home insurance or travel insurance buttons, you’ll see options for protection, conveyancing and now also unsurprisingly, a pathway to self-serve a remortgage.

Last year, around 600,0000 people who had been advised on a mortgage by a firm like you, found their home insurance elsewhere. Furthermore, these sites have also collected upwards of 60 personal and property data fields per quote, providing vast intelligence to market your clients with sophisticated, highly personalised communications to deepen that new founded relationship.

Today’s reality is that most people choose financial advisers to arrange a mortgage, but this does not rule out how much power online brands are gaining by building relationships with a footfall of your clients who seek wider product advice alongside their mortgage. From home insurance to conveyancing, these products are a likely need of your client throughout the homebuying process, if not a legal requirement of the mortgage. It therefore makes a lot of sense for advisory businesses to take these products more seriously to make sure they’re delivering against their client needs.

Mortgage advice certainly opens the door to the potential of building a successful business, but what is becoming more apparent to me is that the breadth of service across wider product areas, is the key to protecting and retaining a loyal and longstanding client base which is well-served. Frankly, I believe it’s a necessity to build sustainable and long-lasting client relationships in 2021 and beyond.

The irony is that innovation in home insurance and conveyancing technology for intermediaries has moved much faster than many direct-to-consumer services. I can’t stress enough that it’s not about spending more hours working, late nights filling in forms or rekeying data. The answer is to choose the right technology partner, who can tangibly evidence their capability to integrate and embed these services within your business.

So, if I asked you now to consider offering wider financial services and advice to your clients, would you? 

By Martin Schultheiss

Having spent time during my career working in private equity, the potential of many business owners being able to sell one day is largely dictated by advanced preparation and awareness of what buyers and investors are looking for. Even if your exit strategy maybe many years away, the practice of thinking and acting like an investor, will only be positive for your business in the long run. After recently stepping into my role here, I often wonder why insurance isn’t offered consistently as a core product in an advisory service. This is from the perspective of servicing a client need alongside a mortgage, but also from a business lens of strengthening the foundations that occur from a recurring revenue flow.

Lost recurring revenue

Across our industry around £367m of potential recurring revenue is lost over five years because advisers do not provide insurance advice consistently. To put that into perspective, a mid-sized mortgage firm advising 35 insurance policies a month will create about £212,000 of additional recurring revenue over the next five years, simply by adding a few minutes of advice. It equates to around 30 per cent growth in revenue per mortgage client, but on top of that, it creates a book value that can be sold at a multiple to create a future income.

For many advice firms today income is largely transactional, one-off proc fees and indemnity commission. The model is sensitive to cash flow challenges and the assets are hard to value. Plainly speaking, a single change in the market, not to mention a global pandemic, has the potential of destabilising a business overnight. The ability for businesses to absorb short to mid-term shocks to cash flow is therefore a common deterrent for buyers, if not probably one of the biggest risks.

Quality data

Another area of interest for potential buyers is a data source that can comprehensively and accurately evidence revenue, margin and multiple product holdings per customer.

The questions I would ask myself as a business owner are how active is the client base? Is it growing? What engagement do I have with clients between arranging one fixed rate mortgage to the next? The simple and most relevant answer for firms thinking about an exit strategy is general insurance. It may not have instant value, but there is certainly value over the longer term. It can help weather the storms, drive regular client engagement and most importantly create saleable value that reflects the effort, time and daily grind that you’ve put into your business.

With Makayla Everett, SimplyBiz

As a continuation of Uinsure’s ‘How the pro’s do it’ campaign, Makayla Everitt, Head of SimplyBiz Mortgages discusses the insurance opportunity that lies within the Buy-to-Let market with her top 10 tips… Don’t forget the tenant!

Tenants could hold the key

With many struggling to get a foot on the property ladder, the demand for rental properties has soared over recent years.

The stigma around owning your own home has changed as more people see long-term rental solutions more financially viable than getting a place of their own. Bearing this in mind, tenants are no different to homeowners in the respect that should something happen to their home, their most cherished possessions are covered. Not only that, but should the property become uninhabitable to any reasons, tenant insurance would find them a place to stay whilst the repairs are made.

Commonly, many tenants believe it is the landlord’s responsibility to arrange contents insurance, where of course, it isn’t. There is also a real risk that many tenants maybe unaware and in breach of tenancy agreements of their contract stipulates contents insurance is required.

Raising awareness in their area is essential. By partnering with local letting agents, you would be able to promote this issue whilst also opening to a new, under-serviced area of the market, with potential to re-engage with these clients further down the line if they do require potential mortgage and protection advice.

You can make a real difference

1. Don’t forget tenants want to protect their income and families too. Offer them a review to ensure they are kept secure.
2. Don’t forget that Landlords also need protection and there are a number of landlord focused products available to support across a number of areas.
3. Don’t have the time? Referring Landlord Insurances, LPS and Rent Guarantee offers security and will open the door to new future clients.
4. Win, win – offer an enhanced letting agreement for better protected tenants.
5. You can support your landlords in getting back to auctions and undertaking refurbishment with Bridge-to-Let products.
6. Clients of tomorrow – don’t underestimate the value of Contents Only policies.
7. Create loyalty with existing landlords, use the agent’s knowledge to guide where they buy. This will create an instant let, the landlord is then happy to give the agent yet another property.
8. Tenants giving notice are potentially your purchasers of today. Referrals from the letting agent can benefit all concerned.
9. Free marketing literature to support referral business is available from most insurance providers.
10. Increase your brand awareness, board presence and overall business growth by developing string relationships with agents in your area.

Let’s not forget landlords

With rental property demand the highest it has been in decades, and more clients entering the Buy-to-Let space- have you considered targeting portfolio and landlord clients in your area?

Following the turbulent year that was 2020, the mantra ‘expect the unexpected’ never rang truer. Landlords and letting agents place great value on loyal and dependable tenants who provide regular income. Landlord insurance is a viable solution to all landlords ensuring that if the property is damaged, uninhabitable or lays vacant for an extended period that the property is repaired, and the landlord is not left out of pocket.

You can offer to work in association with your local letting agents in a mutually beneficent manner, you work can provide them, and you, with an income, it can safeguard the owner of the property against having to find another tenant, thus running the risk of a loss of income and, perhaps most importantly, it will also provide safety and security for the renting party. Quite literally, and like every fairground across the UK, everyone’s a winner.

So, hopefully you are now thinking which letting agents you have in your area, and who will benefit from your experience, knowledge, and professionalism. Please remember a lot of these business leads can be referred, ensuring you receive maximum income for minimum time spent.

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.