UnderwriteMe is investing in a larger dedicated team to support the increased demand from distributors for the Protection Platform.
The Protection Platform has been specifically designed to make life easier for distributors who sell protection products by allowing them to quote, underwrite, compare and sell with ‘buy now’ prices from a wide range of UK providers.
Pippa Keefe, who joined the business in August 2018 as Director, Strategic Accounts will lead this larger team under the newly created role of Distribution Director, which includes distributor strategy, implementation and support for the Protection Platform.
Joining Pippa’s team from 1 April 2019 in the role of National Distribution Manager is Phil Nash. Phil has worked in the financial services Industry for over 20 years, largely focusing on protection where he was part of the start-up team for the IFA protection arm of Royal Liver and Fortis Life, which later became AIG Life. He has worked with networks, comparison sites and large distributors and has an in-depth understanding of the UK intermediary distribution business.
To complement the increased distribution activity, UnderwriteMe is investing in its operations function. Under the leadership of UnderwriteMe’s Chief Operating Officer, Julie Evans, the operations infrastructure has been expanded and strengthened through the appointment of Carina Rogers, who joined as Director of Business Operations in late 2018 and Ian McLean, who joined on 12 March 2019 as Head of IT.
Carina’s role focuses on customer services, to ensure existing and new distributors get the help and support they require to fully utilise the business benefits offered by the Protection Platform.
Ian leads the firm’s scaling up of IT and customer programme delivery to ensure systems continue to deliver a responsive service to all customers across both distributors and providers as production capacity doubles.
Martin Werth, UnderwriteMe’s Chief Executive Officer, says: “We’ve had an overwhelmingly positive response from distributors to step change in the Protection Platform with the new customer journey and Defaqto product rating. We are now delivering “buy now” decisions to almost 1,000 customers per day. As a result, we are investing in people and capability to grow our business and in due course the protection market.”
“No other service currently exists that can deliver the functionality and benefits of the Protection Platform and we will continue to work to add features that enhance the user experience. For example, the new customer journey means that one application covering multiple products takes 10 minutes to compare fully underwritten terms across nine insurers. This enables our customers to use technology to provide their customers with faster recommendations based on a personalised analysis of the market, as required by the Insurance Distribution Directive (IDD).”
