The protection industry needs to look to affinity groups if it is to grow the market in the face of a lack of public trust, Cuna Mutual has said.
Paul Walsh, CEO of Cuna Mutual Group, said churches, credit unions, professional associations and societies all have a part to play if protection markets are to grow.
Talking to COVER, he said: "This sector has collapsed due to its inability to change and due to scandals.
"The £8bn PPI market is not going to return, the consumer has been lost as we have deceived people we needed to protect.
"However we are genuinely seeing a return to family and community values and this is being accentuated by a lack of general trust in financial services.
"People trust affinity groups they are a member of and will buy protection through them, as long as the products are equal to or better than directly available products."
He added that the reorganisation of protection needed to be consumer driven, not lender, broker or insurer driven.
"The way forward is to take existing products, to re-engineer them, to re-cost them and to bring them back to market through other pathways," he said.
"We need to become what Intel is to computers, embedded, only for affinity groups."
He added that an imbedding of protection into other financial products was another route back into the market, noting that he was aware of a lender looking for a fair and honest way to protect first time buyers through integrating cover as an integral part of the mortgage loan.
