A STORY OF R EGR ET April 2016
Too posh to protect? Has providing protection advice become unfashionable? This is the question asked by Colin Sutton (pictured), Wealth Planner and Head of Office at Sanlam Wealth Management, Bristol as he sends a strong reminder to fellow advisers of the need to put protection back at the top of the financial planning agenda. Combining with Giles Cross, who shares his very personal story on page 16, both deliver a highly compelling message about the importance of planning for unforeseen events. I believe passionately in the importance and value of “protection”. To me it’s an intrinsic part of the financial planning process. It’s something that should occupy a position of primacy in our minds and the minds of our clients. We advise on the creation of wealth, its growth, its management and its transfer through generations. Surely we must also ensure its protection? Surely it’s at the heart of what we do? Through advising on life assurance, critical illness cover, income protection benefit and private medical insurance we underwrite dreams and lifestyle, both in the present and in the future;
we influence the well-being and lives of current and future generations; we deliver piece of mind; we do our job. Speaking to fellow advisers I am concerned that protection advice seems to have become unfashionable. That in our search for professional justification we have chosen, as a profession, to focus on investment advice and that, in our desire to distance ourselves from our life assurance roots, we may have become “too posh to protect”. Also, it may be that the proliferation of financial price comparison websites which prioritise cost above suitability have created a consumer perception of protection products as being
“second class”; something that can be sorted out cheaply, without the need for advice, at a later date or abandoned altogether. Therefore our challenge must be to change these perceptions and put protection back at the top of the agenda. We have to diarise and allow time for this topic in conversation and ensure it has appropriate significance within the fact finding process. No one enjoys facing up to their own mortality or the possibility of severe ill health but we must not allow ourselves or our clients to simply brush over the protection sections and we must be firm and precise in
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