"We are delighted to have another significant integration partner on board and make all these enhancements available to advisers using both platforms. For advisers with an existing CIExpert subscription there is no additional cost."
- Alan Lakey, Director at CIExpert
Today, CIExpert has announced the integration of its critical illness cover (CIC) comparison services and Insurer Insight Zone with UnderwriteMe’s Protection Platform, creating a protection journey that quantifies both quality and cost of CIC using fully underwritten premiums to ensure advisers are complying with Consumer Duty.
Unlike previous integrations, advisers will not only be able to transfer client data, underwriting decisions, and standard & underwritten premiums to CIExpert using its personalised predictive analysis to produce a bespoke and compliant comparison but build their own DIY multi-policy packages. By combining CIExpert’s CIC/SIC quality assessments with UnderwriteMe’s ability to apply to multiple insurers simultaneously, advisers can consolidate benefits from different ‘best of breed’ protection insurers to offer more flexibility than ever before.
The navigation of this integration has been designed to be intuitive and user-friendly. As such, the Protection Platform’s fully underwritten quote information is displayed alongside CIExpert’s quality rankings so that price and quality can be assessed at the same time. This allows advisers to review the options with a client and then immediately apply to put the policy(s) on risk.
Alan Lakey, Director at CIExpert, has said that it is “crucial” when working with a client to review the options available to them and that this dialogue is carried out in a timely manner. “Often a conversation has been initiated by perhaps a change in family circumstances or the purchase of a new property,” he explained. Highlighting the delays that can be involved in accessing doctors’ reports to confirm underwriting decisions, Lakey believes that for the first time, “this integration has created the capacity to readily assess fully underwritten prices against quality of cover, making the process from initial discussion with a client to getting a policy in place, arguably the fastest process available in the market.”
“With the introduction of the new Consumer Duty regulation, this integration provides advisers with another valuable tool to help lighten the load. By helping advisers provide their clients with an efficient and timely service, avoid making those chasing calls for underwriting decisions and finally to be able to provide their clients a CIExpert report that includes the fully underwritten options for them to consider; these benefits can only result in improved customer outcomes.”
Phil Nash, Director of Sales at UnderwriteMe expressed his delight at the announcement, explaining that this integration creates a “unique proposition by providing the ability to quickly and seamlessly obtain fully underwritten premiums alongside a CIExpert product comparison report.” He agreed that the collaboration is compliant with Consumer Duty, “providing both price certainty and quality of product in a single journey - this puts control into the hands of the adviser and is closely aligned to the principles of fair value and customer outcomes.”
Having used CIExpert as a core part of its protection advice proposition for more than a decade, Nicola McKenzie, Co-Founder of Dunham McCarthy, felt that having the ability to combine both CIExpert’s comprehensive critical illness (CI) analysis with the underwriting certainty UnderwriteMe will “only enhance the quality of the advice our advisers provide as they can now recommend the insurer that fully meets their needs from a product, price and now underwriting perspective by combining two platforms into a single seamless solution.”
