F&TRC to release protection retention benchmarking

The Finance & Technology Research Centre (F&TRC) Protection Forum is to report on the benchmarking of provider’s protection retention systems in December.

In October 2010 COVER reported that the forum produced a draft good practice statement for business retention systems, based on the views of advisers.

Central to the document was the speed at which advisers are notified of when direct debits are missed or cancelled so customers can be contacted in a matter of days rather than weeks.

Ian McKenna, Director of F&TRC: "Essentially we have come up with guidelines in the good practice statement and have been asking providers how many they have put in place.

"To be fair some of these changes will not be immediate, as they are systems based and will take time. So this is to be a periodic exercise."

He added that the data was currently being collated and F&TRC would know the result in around a week, for release in December.

"We tried to get some kind of idea a couple of munths ago," he said, "but it was, frankly, too soon because of the system changes involved.

"To set expectations realistically, if two or three providers have done something then that will be a plus, companies plan their IT changes a long way ahead."

Speaking last week at Legal and General's (L&G) retention awards McKenna noted that L&G figures showed protection written into trust had retention rates of up to ten times higher than policies not written to trust.

He said: "Why is this? I think we need to investigate this further."

F&TRC is known to have had initial discussions on the subject with the Protection Review.

Adviser firms working with Protection Forum include LifeSearch, London & Country, Proactive Medical & Life, Sesame Bankhall Group and Master Adviser