GI Academy launched to help advisers recoup 'millions' in lost protection sales

During the summer, the home insurance specialist highlighted a 'guilty gap' among advisers, with 60% admitting to regularly overlooking opportunities to sell GI despite recognition from 99% of advisers that it was ‘best practice’ to do so.

Last year, Paymentshield quantified the scale of the commission advisers were losing out on, calculating the loss at £47.8m from missed home insurance sales in 2019.

Reasons for missing out on opportunities to sell GI were revealed in Paymentshield’s annual Adviser Survey, with 13.6% putting this down to a lack of product knowledge, 51.4% a lack of time, and 17.9% its firm’s priorities.

Paymentshield say the GI Academy has been created to combat all of these issues, enriching advisers’ GI knowledge through e-books, whitepapers, and links to events all designed to prevent habitually missed opportunities and to generate more GI sales. It will also host a series of product tests which will help advisers identify any gaps in their product knowledge.

The initiative is aimed at mortgage advisers and general insurance specialists who are either currently selling GI or looking to diversify their offering to clients, and is freely available to all advisers regardless of whether they already use Paymentshield.

Louise Pengelly, Proposition Director at Paymentshield, says:

“Both a lack of product knowledge and a lack of time have been cited as key reasons why advisers are missing out on opportunities to sell GI. Whether that’s a feeling that the sales process is too lengthy, they don’t have the time to build up product knowledge or haven’t had the time to integrate it into existing systems – GI Academy has been designed and built to directly tackle all these issues. "

“Indeed, this initiative further supports our commitment to knowledge sharing and encouraging mortgage advisers to have more conversations about GI – both to ensure that more homes are fully protected and to boost their business revenue.”