Enhanced home insurance offers greater protection for your clients

As of today, we’ve launched a new and improved Home Insurance bringing a significantly increased level of protection for your clients and equipping advisers with a stronger product when discussing general insurance.

While several adjustments have been made to the product in recent years, this update sees a fundamental overhaul of our core limits and follows extensive market research with both customers and advisers, conducted alongside Paymentshield’s insurance partners. 

The enhanced product reflects current market conditions, including the increased cost of building materials and post-Covid changes to the way we live, such as the growing popularity of outbuildings.

Upgrades to the policy include increasing the limit on cover for buildings to a blanket amount of £1 million to better protect customers needing to make a Buildings Insurance claim, as inflation drives up the cost of parts, materials and labour. Cover for theft from garages and other outbuildings (including garden offices and bars) is also being increased from £3,000 to £5,000.

Additional cover has been added for electric bikes, mobility scooters and hot tubs – which comes in response to the changing needs of customers. Up to £10,000 of Contents Insurance cover is now also available for any permanent household members who move out, such as into student accommodation or a nursing home.

In addition to the policy changes, we’ve redesigned our customer policy letters to make them more inclusive for all customers – in turn helping to ensure that Consumer Duty requirements are met throughout the customer journey. 

We hope that the enhanced policy will make the GI conversation easier for advisers, by arming them with a policy that provides a greater level of protection for their clients.

Emma Green, Director of Distribution at Paymentshield, says:

“We know that our home insurance product already comfortably met the needs of the majority of households, but we wanted to make it an even stronger product so advisers can confidently quote every client knowing that it offers enough coverage.

“Due to market conditions, we know advisers are having to do more with less. So, whether they use our optimised home insurance quote journey to generate an accurate quote in under a minute, refer their business to our expert in-house team, who can advise the customer on their behalf, or refer them to our online purchase option, we believe our proposition confidently delivers for advisers helping their clients to find quality home insurance.”

What about pipeline quotations?

For any Paymentshield Home Insurance quotes currently in Adviser Hub, here are the dates to be aware of:

All existing Home Insurance quotations and pending policies will expire at midnight 30 April, if not submitted by this date. We recommend checking with any impacted clients in good time to see if they want to proceed with the policy. 

Once the quote has expired, if a client wants to proceed with their application for a Paymentshield policy, you'll need to go into Adviser Hub and re-quote from the beginning. They'll then be quoted on the new policy and its limits. 

If you need to make any amendments to your client’s policy from Monday 19 February, such as increased policy limits, purchasing any optional extras or adding on any specified items, then your client will be re-quoted on the updated Paymentshield Home Insurance policy. 

All Paymentshield policyholders who have set up an online account can view and manage the details of their insurance online.

More information on the changes to our Home Insurance can be found below.