Announcing the Protection Review I Mark for Innovation
We’re delighted to award the very first I Mark to:
Vitality’s Dementia and FrailCare Cover. Click here to read our review.
Congratulations Vitality.
Now let's tell you what the I Mark is all about.
Innovation is at the heart of how protection insurance can reach a wider audience. Past examples include not only new products such as critical illness insurance from the 1980s, but more recent developments such as straight through processing, teleunderwriting and the growth of third party services, as well as changes to the products themselves.
At Protection Review our aim has always been to encourage better solutions for end customers – whether they be individuals, families or businesses. Our long-running product reviews reflect that and we have always included a rating for innovation as well as an overall rating. Now we are going a stage further.
From January 2019, as well as continuing to comment on new products and including an overall rating, if we think a product is sufficiently innovative, we’ll give it an I Mark instead of a numerical rating and we’ve developed a new logo that you can promote to your customers and advisers. It's simpler and it's more effective.
It tells them you’ve done something we think is different – be it a product feature, back office development; in fact, anything that shows original and innovative thinking to the potential benefit of customers or advisers.
We won't award an I Mark for simple improvements, for example adding a few new critical illness conditions to an existing list. Whilst we believe that's good for customers, and all product improvements are to be welcomed, we want the I Mark to recognise true innovation rather than evolution.
Interview
Andy Couchman, co-founder of Protection Review, and writer of our reviews talks more about the I Mark in this interview with Roger Edwards on the Marketing and Finance Podcast. You can listen by clicking on the media player below.
When we award an I Mark, we’ll feature it on the website review and tell you about it so you can then licence its use to use however you want. To keep things simple, a set fee of £2,000 plus VAT allows you to use both the Protection Review and new I Mark logos for that product or service for 12 months.
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