Welcome to the first edition of the Paradigm Protect Newsletter for 2024! As ever, we try to bring you some different perspectives via a range of topical articles from Providers. This edition focuses on not just the reasons for clients having Income Protection (IP), but also explores how illness can result in loneliness. Indeed, despite how much time we spend with colleagues as part of our working days, alienation from work colleagues is often overlooked as a symptom of illness. Of course, alienation can take place in many forms, and another of our articles highlights the importance of embracing inclusion and diversity. I hope you’ll find this edition useful - let’s get started! The Market During the pandemic, I used to keep an eye on Google searches for both Life and Income Protection to see whether there was a raised level of interest or activity in either sector. Unsurprisingly, there was in both areas, as people looked for solutions to what may have been a major issue - dampened eventually by the provision of the furlough scheme. Interestingly there was a 2-3 month spike in activity, and then it reverted to normal. From January last year, I started to see there has been another - albeit not as significant - spike in the activity again, repeated again this year in January - perhaps as people start to understand the vulnerability of their own financial positions as prices rise and the economy is, at best, flat - leading to a great deal of uncertainty. This bottom-up demand for IP seems to have significantly manifested itself in IP sales in 2023. Whether you look at premium growth or policy sales, IP outperformed sales of all other mainstream products we associate with mortgage sales. This could be as a result of consumer demand, perhaps driven by the increase in difficulty of acquiring a property or an increased focus on IP by advisers, partly as a result of Consumer Duty implementation, or indeed, a combination of the two. Mike Allison Director of Protection Paradigm Protect Protection Market Update 04 SPRING PROTECT NEWSLETTER
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