With redundancies and the other impacts of Covid affecting households around the country, financial resilience is in the spotlight now more than ever.

Only 50 per cent of households with mortgages have life insurance and the numbers are falling. When you consider that almost 11m households in the UK have mortgages, that’s a lot of households that potentially have no protection should the worst happen.

More worrying still, only 9 per fcent of consumers say they have some form of income protection.

In the current environment more and more consumers are likely to look for ways to protect their income and lifestyle, and may turn to advisers for help. But what assurances do they have that the adviser they’re talking to understands their needs, and the benefits of all the different products available?

There are more than 100 companies that provide life assurance and protection policies but that makes it a complex environment for consumers to navigate and is just one of the reasons why consumers should ask advisers for help.

Protection adviser qualifications

Regulated advisers undertake a long journey to become fully qualified. For example, the Certificate in Mortgage Advice and Practice takes 12 months to study and requires ongoing continual professional development.

But what about those who advise on protection policies? What assurances do consumers have that the advisers they are talking to understand their needs and the benefits of different protection policies?

As things stand, there’s no regulatory requirement for anyone advising on financial protection to be qualified.

That’s why we’ve launched the Certificate in Protection – or CertPRO.

CertPRO is an entry-level qualification and can get you started in a professional career in, for example, mortgage advice or financial advice. For those who already have CeMAP, not only does it provide knowledge you can build on, it can be credited towards CeMAP 2.

How qualifications support SMCR training and competence

If a qualification in protection advice is not mandatory, how do managers know that their staff are keeping up to date with training and providing the right advice to their customers?

That can be tricky, but they have a strong incentive to try.

The Senior Managers and Certification Regime makes all managers in a controlled function personally responsible for the competence of their staff in a regulated environment.

A dedicated qualification allows those managers to demonstrate that their staff are competent. And, by training someone more junior to advise on protection, firms can free up their more experienced brokers to focus on finding the right mortgage for their clients.

Let’s also not forget that an often-overlooked part of the housing sector that needs even more protection than ever is the rental market. Private tenants are in a precarious predicament if they should lose their income, relying solely on the good will of landlords rather than the banks who have a much greater social responsibility these days. It’s a worrying position to be in.

Add to this vulnerable clients, who need more protection than most.

A skilled and knowledgeable protection practitioner with all the educational tools to support them in doing a first-class job for their clients is not only an asset to their clients but to society as a whole. The value of really knowing what you are doing as an adviser is, ultimately, in protecting individuals and families and so, the whole economy.

Qualifications raise standards and the profile of a market, providing reassurance to consumers.

And consumers do need reassurance – mis-selling scandals have made people sceptical of financial protection. But consulting with a qualified protection adviser is far more likely to ensure their financial resilience than just trying to ‘shop around’ without any real knowledge of what different policies offer. They often only find out its value when it is too late.

For example, protecting a mortgage might appeal to a houseowner, but what a family often really needs is income protection, to allow them to keep living in the house and pay the bills.

Talking through actual circumstances with a trained adviser helps people put limited resources to the best use.

CertPRO will teach advisers about the many different ways of protecting the customer and how to explain the right choice. That’s vital in a dynamic market that’s changing all the time.

John Somerville, head of regulatory relationships, Professional Education at The London Institute of Banking & Finance