Guardian’s new low-cost life cover, Life Essentials, is now available on Guardian’s quote and apply platform, Protection Builder, and major portals.

Advisers have a choice of two different life cover options from Guardian, designed to suit a range of client priorities and protection budgets. These are:

• Life Protection – the existing “premier” life cover, for clients whose priority is quality
• Life Essentials – the new low-cost life cover, for clients whose priority is price

This follows Guardian’s announcement earlier this month about its plans to offer a choice of life covers within its Protection Menu. By offering this choice, Guardian seeks to better support advisers with clients who have been impacted by the higher cost of living and to widen customer access to Guardian’s menu of outcomes-focused protection products.

The new low-cost Life Essentials is designed to appeal to price-sensitive clients and advisers whose priority for life cover is affordability, while still generating good outcomes by retaining the essential features that inform Guardian’s approach and philosophy. It sits alongside Guardian’s existing premier Life Protection which appeals to clients and advisers whose priority is quality and who value the enhanced terminal illness definition, 4-week premium waiver and other high-quality features embedded within the premier product.

Hilary Banks, sales director at Guardian, said: “We’re delighted to announce that our new Life Essentials cover is now available for quote and apply within our platform, Protection Builder, as well as on IRESS, iPipeline, Protection Platform from UnderwriteMe, and LifeQuote. Sitting alongside our existing premier life cover, this addition provides more choice for a wide range of advisers looking to put in place Guardian’s award-winning protection for their clients.

“The introduction of greater choice from Guardian has been well received by the market, which is in line with what advisers were telling us about their clients needing to prioritise costs. We’ve also been encouraged by the comments about the role of advice in explaining quality differences, as this choice is ultimately about providing fair value to different customer segments and continuing to drive good outcomes and build trust in our industry.

“Going forward, we’re very excited to begin working with our advice partners to maximise this important distribution opportunity and get more people the protection they need.”

At the same time as Life Essentials going-live, Guardian has made some other changes to its Protection Menu. The first change is to all Decreasing Covers, where Guardian is increasing the interest rate from 5% to 8%. This more closely aligns to mortgage interest rate levels and the rates at which clients will typically be seeing their outstanding mortgage decrease. Alongside, it is removing the Mortgage Guarantee.

In addition, in line with the ABI’s latest review of critical illness minimum standards, Guardian has improved two of its critical illness definitions: Dementia and Low-Grade Prostate cancer.