Sesame’s sales director and long-time advocate of income protection said mortgage brokers must engage with the reality that all clients need protection and be clear about the reasons they don’t sell it - if indeed they don’t.
Mortgage brokers need to be honest with themselves and if they don’t want to sell protection, they need to adopt a strategy to refer clients so their needs are met, Mark Graves has said.
Sesame’s sales director and long-time advocate of income protection said mortgage brokers must engage with the reality that all clients need protection and be clear about the reasons they don’t sell it - if indeed they don’t.
He said: “It might sound a bit strong but I think we are now at a point where advisers who are more focused on mortgages need to consider why they’re not doing more protection if they aren’t.
“It might be because they don’t want to, they might lack resource or confidence in product knowledge or even time.
“Those are all legitimate reasons not to sell protection but the reality is that clients still need to be protected.
“If a broker isn’t going to sell protection then fine, but there are other ways to help customers – be that by referring the client or by changing the sales process.”
Graves was speaking ahead of the upcoming Protection Review annual conference on 14 July in London where he is part of a panel debating how well mortgage and protection advisers work together.
He added: “The mortgage and protection industries can be guilty of not talking enough to each other – this is a great opportunity to change that and for us to find out exactly what mortgage brokers’ challenges are around selling protection.”
Graves will be joined on the panel by Clare Harrop from Lloyds Banking Group and Andy Philo from Vitality.
Protection Review chief executive Kevin Carr said: “We will be discussing a number of themes including when should protection be raised during the mortgage process, how can we improve the journey and integrate better with the mortgage sales process, and what overall direction mortgage protection should take.
“Speaking to advisers we know there are a number of challenges and for many years the protection industry has perhaps misunderstood the mortgage sector. We are keen to hear from advisers on the day about what the market can realistically do to make things better.”
