Protection Guru has announced a major upgrade to its technical information and comparison tool for advisers, increasing the number of product assessments available under its standard licence by 250%.

The update enables users of Protection Guru Pro to conduct more frequent and comprehensive value for money assessments across all major protection product types using a single credit per search.

This represents a significant shift from the previous model, where each credit could only be used for one report, and standard licences were limited to 10 reports per month before incurring additional charges.

The enhancement is designed to encourage advisers to widen their use of the service beyond Critical Illness cover, which accounted for 60% of searches in the first half of 2025, compared with 23% for income protection and just 13% for life insurance. Business protection and other product categories made up the remaining 4%.

Ian McKenna, founder and chief executive of Protection Guru, said: “We have found many advisers misunderstand what our service is designed for. While uniquely we can provide assessment of Critical Illness plans for new and replacement businesses based on comparison on the professional analysis of an esteemed panel of doctors, epidemiologists’ consultants and specialists, this is just part of the service.”

He added: “We give advisers the means to carry out value for money analysis across the full range of major term protection plans. This enables firms to demonstrate better consumer outcomes, improve their Consumer Duty compliance and based on research amongst our users, significantly increase their income.

“By helping clients easily see why a plan that is not the cheapest, may be far better value for money, clients are likely to be willing to agree to the slightly higher premium for the better plan.

“Research with our users in Q4/24 identified that on average an adviser achieves an increase of £295 per policy sold using our system thus recovering six times the £40 + VAT licence fee with their very first sale.

“To be clear our primary motivation is improving consumer outcomes but the fact that we can do that and significantly increase adviser income is a positive side effect.”

Protection Guru Pro was launched to help advisers assess price and proposition across life insurance, critical illness, income protection, family income benefit and business protection products. The platform supports Consumer Duty compliance by allowing comparisons of product quality as well as price.

The changes have been welcomed by advisers. Helen Baker of The Right Mortgage member HVB Financial Services said: “I am delighted Protection Guru are increasing the number of credits we get each month. We use the system so much we have regularly needed to buy more.

“Protection Guru Pro has been a huge benefit to our business and has enabled us to significantly increase the amount of protection business we are able to write. It provides us with the clear evidence of which plans are best and why, in each client’s particular situation which plan is better than others and why.

“This helps us give better advice to clients and meet our Consumer Duty obligations to examine value for money.”