Critical illness is now available via iPipeline’s new indicative underwriting decision tool, XRAE, which is available to all Assureweb portal users.

By capturing health and lifestyle information, XRAE produces indicative ratings and provides a single, comparative view of results, and advisers can now source indicative ratings for both life assurance and critical illness.

The service, which has six providers live for life assurance, has gone live with the introduction of critical illness from LV= and Ageas, and it is available to all Assureweb users free of charge.

Ian Teague, managing director at iPipeline, said: “If a client is non-standard, any conversation about the possible type or cost of cover that might be offered by insurers becomes more difficult. Expectations are difficult to set and the process can be in danger of falling apart. In a recent iPipeline survey of over 1000 advisers, 43% said they lost business as a result of this kind of situation, which is why we introduced XRAE.

“Since launch, we’ve been in constant contact with our users to get feedback, and we have introduced Critical Illness as a result of their need to improve the customer experience and more effectively set expectations.”

Mike Farrell, LV= head of protection sales, said: “We are pleased to be supporting the latest enhancement to XRAE.  As a leading provider of comprehensive Critical Illness cover we recognise that XRAE can add real value to advisers by introducing greater certainty about price at an earlier stage of the process.”

Steve Casey, Head of Marketing and Propositions at Ageas Protect, added: “Intelligent quotations that provide greater clarity for customers are an exciting development in the protection market. We are pleased that advisers can now use XRAE to access applications for Critical Illness cover. This makes life easier for advisers and enables them to manage their clients’ expectations.”