Midwinter boosts Insurance modelling capacity of AdviceOS

Julian Plummer

Midwinter has today announced significant enhancements made to its insurance modelling capability within cloud based – AdviceOS, rolling out the additional functionality to AdviceOS users over the past month.

This significant upgrade was released in two phases, with the enhancements aimed specifically at boosting the efficiency of life insurance advice generation by changing how the cover and policy types are selected.

In addition to adding a large range of policies within the insurance comparator of AdviceOS, advisers will now be able to compare the premiums, features, scoring and definitions of all insurance products side by side – regardless of policy type or tax structure (retail, group or hybrid).

First phase

The first phase of the AdviceOS insurance upgrade surrounds insurance modelling. AdviceOS users are now able to select any insurance cover combinations (Life, TPD, Trauma, IP, Business expenses and Child trauma) as well as the insurance structure (ordinary, super, hybrid) and the insurance policy type (Risk only, super platform, Industry funds, Investment platforms, Master trusts).

The increase in modelling flexibility means the number of insurance recommendations that AdviceOS can produce has also increased. With the larger number of recommendations, comes a larger number of benefits, disadvantages and risks for each recommendation. This gives Midwinter users a larger scope of insurance advice topics, in addition to the 120 different strategies that AdviceOS can currently model.

Second phase

The second phase of the upgrade includes enhanced insurance research data to allow advisers to compare retail and group insurance in the one analysis. To this end, Midwinter has worked closely with Rice Warner to ensure that all our insurance features, scoring and definitions across retail and group have been aligned to allow a like-for-like comparison of all products.

Additional features in the second phase include:

• Occupation matrix – as each insurance supplier treats and defines occupations differently, AdviceOS now allows users to ensure the occupation rating they are using to compare insurance policies across disparate suppliers is consistent, allowing for a true apples-to-apples comparison.
• Strength and weaknesses – to assist advisers in the insurance policy selection process, the strengths and weaknesses can now be quickly determined for each insurance policy candidate.
• Exception reporting – when an adviser requests policy premiums from a range of suppliers, AdviceOS will tell the adviser why certain products didn’t appear. For instance the client may have been too young or too old the specific products – and this information is quickly communicated to the adviser.

Speaking of the AdviceOS Insurance upgrade, Managing Director of Midwinter – Julian Plummer said “Midwinter embraces feedback from our clients regarding our software offerings, ensuring that our solutions are always developed with the needs of the end user in mind. When it came to the insurance modelling section of our software, after garnering valuable feedback from our users, we have been able to build a state of the art life insurance modelling framework, which has opened up a variety of strategy and policy options to advisers and saved them a great deal of time when choosing the right policies for their clients.”

“When carrying out upgrades of this nature, the end goal is always about making livers easier – making it easier for the adviser to select the right options for their client, and making it easier for the client to understand the advice that has been given to them.”

“The majority of advisers we have spoken with over the last few months have been preparing for next year’s Life Insurance Framework (LIF) changes. Given the impact these changes are having, the feedback we have been getting is that advisers need even more streamlined insurance modelling software to offset the time it has taken for them to review their business models.”

“Obviously the change in adviser remuneration is going to have an impact on adviser profitability, which means a higher focus on efficiencies within their advice practices. This means we have had a major push to further decrease the time it takes to produce insurance advice in AdviceOS.”

Previously, users could only compare a limited number of combinations of cover type for inside and outside super. Now, AdviceOS users can compare any product across all structures. The benefit of these enhancements means that advisers can concentrate on modelling the underlying insurance strategy regardless of the structure, or how the insurance is packaged.”