Mortgage and protection broker, Access Financial Services has surpassed 20 protection providers on its panel with the addition of its latest providers Hive Insurance Services and HSBC.

Access, which now has in excess of 160 mortgage and protection brokers, focuses heavily on protection advice, with one half of its advisers being specialist protection-only advisers, the rest focusing both on mortgages and protection.

In addition to the newest applicants to its protection panel, it also recently teamed up with Vitality to provide an academy to help train advisers new to protection. Some are mortgage advisers wanting to specialise further in protection, others come from a banking background or are completely new to advice.

During the protection academy, all new advisers receive in-depth training not just in product knowledge and compliance, but also in market skills, sales and cross selling. They are also provided with mentoring from highly experienced brokers as well as support and guidance in how to build their own businesses.

Karl Wilkinson (pictured), CEO of Access FS, said: “Providing protection advice has been at the heart of what Access FS has been about ever since we were founded five years ago. It is difficult times such as now that protection becomes absolutely essential for borrowers and we anticipate that the importance of protection is only going to grow over the next challenging few months.

“We believe in training advisers so they are highly qualified and confident, not only in what they are saying but their approach to protection and to clients. This results in better outcomes for the client but when an adviser knows what they are talking about the amount of business they complete also goes up.

“As a result of the quality of the protection business that we submit, we have had a flurry of protection providers asking to be on our panel, hence we now have 20, high-quality protection firms for our advisers to work with and more in the pipeline.”