Paymentshield has launched its GI Academy in order to provide financial advisers with General Insurance (GI) knowledge that will help them to diversify their services, protect themselves against market turbulence and close the “guilty gap”.

During the summer, the home insurance specialist highlighted a “guilty gap” among advisers, with 60% admitting to regularly overlooking opportunities to sell GI despite recognition from 99% of advisers that it was ‘best practice’ to do so.
Last year, Paymentshield quantified the scale of the commission advisers were losing out on, calculating the loss at £47.8m from missed home insurance sales in 2019.

Reasons for missing out on opportunities to sell GI were revealed in Paymentshield’s annual Adviser Survey, with 13.6% putting this down to a lack of product knowledge, 51.4% a lack of time, and 17.9% its firm’s priorities.

The GI Academy has been created to combat all of these issues, enriching advisers’ GI knowledge through expertly crafted resources so that they can become GI specialists in their own right and at their own pace.

The initiative is aimed at mortgage advisers and General Insurance specialists who are either currently selling GI or looking to diversify their offering to clients. It is the first time Paymentshield has brought its training resources together in one place.

In an effort to raise standards and training industry-wide, Paymentshield has made the Academy freely available to all advisers regardless of whether they already use Paymentshield.

Louise Pengelly, proposition director at Paymentshield, said: “Both a lack of product knowledge and a lack of time have been cited as key reasons why advisers are missing out on opportunities to sell GI. Whether that’s a feeling that the sales process is too lengthy, they don’t have the time to build up product knowledge or haven’t had the time to integrate it into existing systems – GI Academy has been designed and built to directly tackle all these issues.

“Indeed, this initiative further supports our commitment to knowledge sharing and encouraging mortgage advisers to have more conversations about GI – both to ensure that more homes are fully protected and to boost their business revenue.”

The Academy will initially launch with two modules consisting of six chapters which will be approximately three hours of learning towards the annual 15-hour CPD requirement under the Insurance Distribution Directive. Additional modules and resources will then be added over the coming weeks and months.

The GI Academy’s supporting resources will comprise of e-books, whitepapers, and links to events all designed to prevent habitually missed opportunities and to generate more GI sales. It will also host a series of product tests which will help advisers identify any gaps in their product knowledge.