Paymentshield has extended its three-month payment holiday offer to include new, as well as existing, home insurance customers. 

The move is designed to provide greater sales support to advisers, enabling them to directly offer temporary financial relief to clients.

It is also expected to help advisers seize the current opportunities in general insurance (GI) with remortgage and product transfer customers. 

The extension to new customers sees Paymentshield go beyond the measures introduced by the Financial Conduct Authority two weeks ago in response to Covid-19. Those rules stipulated that insurers must offer payment holidays of up to three months if existing customers are still struggling to pay premiums after amends have been made to reduce their cover.  

In a recent YouGov survey of over 2000 UK adults, commissioned by Paymentshield to understand the impact of coronavirus, 35% of respondents said they were actively looking to cut costs more than before.

Via the Paymentshield Adviser Hub, advisers will now be able to offer new home insurance clients a payment holiday for the first three months of their policy. The annual cost of the policy will then be spread over the remaining nine months.  

Paymentshield is also encouraging advisers to use the three-month payment holiday option as a reason to get in touch with clients they may not have had cause to contact in a while to see if they’d like a review of their current home insurance, or for upcoming remortgage or product transfer clients who may need more of an incentive to switch providers.   

Rob Evans (pictured), CEO of Paymentshield, said: “We want to ensure that the best protection is accessible to everyone at all times, which is why we have made the three-month payment holiday a permanent offer to new and existing customers. In the current climate, this may be a very appealing offer to many people who have been hit hard by Covid-19. For advisers too, the launch of this offer is intended to support their businesses and enable them to continue selling home insurance during this period of financial uncertainty. Longer term, we recognise that a temporary payment holiday may appeal to those whose finances may have been heavily channelled elsewhere, such as into a costly house move or a first-time house purchase.  

“We hope that it prevents people from either cancelling their home insurance altogether, or swapping to a cheaper alternative that they find online, without speaking to an adviser about whether that product even meets their needs. For advisers, the payment holiday can help to bring in new business, or can be a reason to get in touch with existing customers – helping to build a stronger relationship in the long-term.”