Kathryn:           Hi everybody. We are on episode three of Season six, and I have Alan Desir with us from Contact State. Hi Alan.

Alain:                Hello.

Kathryn:           Um, today we’re gonna be talking about lead generation consumer consent online and the consumer duty principle. This is the Practical Protection Podcast. [00:00:30] So, Alan, how are you doing? Are things okay where you are?

Alain:                Yeah, it’s good. They’re good. Yeah, no, just, just did the school run. So, uh, that’s, you know, that’s back in our lives after the bit of a break. Uh, and uh, it’s funny cause you sort of missed that time actually cause it gives you some time to think about your day and what’s coming on and you know, what, what, what you need to get done. So, uh, and, and this morning I was thinking about you, so, ah, there we go.

Kathryn:           Oh, absolutely. I was gonna say, I, I did lose that kind of like yeah, that routine side of things, but I was quite lucky because [00:01:00] in, um, just very, very close by to us, it’s like a local football cricket ground type thing. So in the summer they had like a cricket summer camp on and, um, and my boys love it and, um, and so they went almost every day to summer camp. So I was just like, just bringing them along, like usual.

Alain:                Yeah,

Kathryn:           I’ll be back at three kids kind of thing.

Alain:                So

Kathryn:           Yeah, it was, um, it was very, very handy to have that on hand for, for most of the summer. Okay, so let’s get into things for everybody. So I think it’s a good idea, Alan, to start off by you [00:01:30] telling us a bit about yourself and who you are and what’s led you to where you are today.

Alain:                Sure. Uh, well, so look, I I’ve been involved in marketing and advertising for 15, 16 years. Um, I’ve been, I’m a, I suppose I’m a classic poacher term gamekeeper, and I’ll explain the poacher first. I, I’ve run two different lead generation businesses. First one based in the us um, uh, and then I took, brought, sort of, brought the model here really and [00:02:00] set up a business with a business partner called Affinity, uh, leads. And we were a classic lead generation agency involved in lots of different products, directly authorized from two 11. Um, that was a successful business. We were acquired by a private equity firm and then, and then laterally, they were required by alls. Um, and sort of, I hate to sort of put it as a sort of, what do you wanna do next moment, but it was literally, what do I wanna do next?

Alain:                I knew I didn’t really wanna do lead generation anymore. Um, [00:02:30] that business was gonna become a distributor and now a very successful distributor under name of of Candid. Um, but I knew I didn’t wanna do that, and that’s not where my passion lay. So one of the things that I sort of kept going back to was, so I was so deeply frustrated by fraudulently generation, by reselling of consumer data, by how ineffective GDPR had been in terms of actually changing consumer outcomes. You know, we got these great sort of, you know, lengthy cookie cookie descriptions on [00:03:00] websites. We all have to, we all accept without looking at them. But that wasn’t actually changing the way that people’s data was being protected. And so came up with this idea with my business partner Mike, blaming of, of data consent and certification. So our view was we could change the way that people gave their consent and understood what they were consenting by essentially giving, giving, uh, certifying each data transaction so that we are looking for, uh, consent or landing page.

Alain:                And, and that business is three years old now. We’ve sort of, um, [00:03:30] we are, uh, we are growing, we are in a number of different sectors. Clearly protection is, is where we started. Um, health insurance and life insurance and income protection. We do lots more now. We do equity release and mortgages and we’re looking at higher education and solar panels. And anywhere a consumer gives their details is we, what, what we are interested in. What we are interested in is two things. We want to see the terms of conditions, um, and the wording a consumer is being, being asked to sign up to. Uh, and we wanna capture that for two [00:04:00] reasons. One, we wanna see that it’s there, but also we’re trying to help businesses manage that, um, manage that liability and we’ll get into that. Well, that means, I guess in terms of the consumer, um, what I would say for your listeners and for this podcast is we have undeniably, unequivocally proved that misleading data consent leads to a higher council from outset and a higher lapse rate.

Alain:                Yes. Um, now clearly these are the things that insurers, the, the whole industry is, is concerned about how do you grow the protection [00:04:30] industry? Well, you grow it by, by, um, by making the quality better by by, by stopping people feeling like they’ve been missold something. And one of the things that we, what we think is contributing to a, you know, higher cancellation rate is consumers feeling like they’ve been tripped into applying for something. And so I think one of the things that we help our clients do is see exactly the leads that they’re buying <laugh>, um, before we came along. Like it wouldn’t, but it wasn’t possible to know, oh, what, where are my leads [00:05:00] coming from? And I think clients that work with us now answer that question quite comprehensively, cuz we take a screenshot of the landing page before it gets then. So yeah. In, in a sort of long winded potted career history, that’s me.

Kathryn:           Okay. That’s brilliant. I mean, there’s a couple of things that ended up really stand out for me, like you say about people just clicking yes to, to cookies and stuff like that. I have to say I’m guilt, you know, I’m wondering, I dunno if it’s maybe sometimes an age type thing. Also think, I sometimes see people on Twitter who are older than me and, and they’ll just say, and I think of my mum as well and she’s just like, It’s asking me to do something. What should I do? And I’m just like, Mum, it’s [00:05:30] the nhs, it’s fineing, don’t worry, they’re not gonna, you know, Well, I say they’re not gonna do anything data wise, but I’m just like, look, it’s fine you just wanting to look at a page on your health condition, Don’t worry about it. But I do get a bit blase about just saying accept things.

Kathryn:           I have to say that I do get a, I am blaser that way, buts like, if there’s something and it’s wanting my date of birth and I can’t see why they need my date of birth, I just lie. And I’m just like, Well, you’re not gonna get it, you know, kind of thing. I’m just, you know, obviously if it was my insurance, it’s very, very different. Um, but really interesting to say that. And I think another thing you’re saying about like, you know, making sure from an advisor point of [00:06:00] view about, um, legitimacy of where our leads are coming from and things like that. And then that whole thing about callbacks and stuff. Now I think sometimes as advisors, um, we can often think, you know, well that’s, that’s another firm over there. That’s not us. We are advisors. We’re really good at this. And, and I think it can sometimes come down to whereabouts you are in that process of seeing it to say like a cure.

Kathryn:           You know, we, we have very specific processes in place, you know, as to where our leads come from. And myself, Alan who own [00:06:30] the company, we, we are right there seeing it in a sense. You know, so we are really on top of it and know what’s going on. Admit a far more than me, I’m not as much of a tech person as he is, but you know, you know, it’s our website, they’re coming from there. Um, you know, things like that and, and potentially introduced. But again, there is certain amounts of due diligence if someone is introducing clients to you Yeah. That you are still responsible for that. But, um, but one stood out for me, my mind, I just, if people are thinking, Oh, it’s just over there. Well, I was speaking to somebody once, it was a gentleman and, um, I [00:07:00] can’t remember, I think he was in his fifties and he’d come to chat to me about some life insurance.

Kathryn:           And I picked up, and I think this is another thing to say to your duty if you pick this up as well in other situations to potentially step in. So I’d picked up that he’d been spoken to by an advisor firm about his private medical insurance and significantly reducing his premium on his cover and doing him a new plan, but straight about, I had alarm bells going off everywhere because this person would come to me for life insurance. And as most people know by now, [00:07:30] especially, I tend to help people with high risk situations. Now, this person, I can’t remember everything, but he had at least had skin cancer in the last two years. And so straight away I was just like, So when did they rearrange this policy for you? Oh, they did it about two months ago. I was like, Oh, and how did you go to them?

Kathryn:           No, they just rang me up. And you know, this isn’t like a, this isn’t a dodgy firm or anything, you know, you know, this isn’t an advisor firm somewhere who’s dealing in private medical insurance. Yeah. And [00:08:00] so straight away, because I’m very aware of this kind of thing, having spoken to people like yourself before Alan and, and different things that we do, I immediately got a private medical insurance specialist that I know to contact this gentleman. And they had to, obviously, luckily they were able to reverse everything because straight away there was exclusions on there, there was, you know, it was saving lots of money, but for very specific reason, you know, because it was making him a much less quality product. Um, and I think, you know, that’s an extra thing as well as we’re saying it is about finding, making sure your [00:08:30] lead source is, are legitimate, but it’s also making sure that if you are suspicious of something that isn’t going right, just dig that a little bit more as well. You know, it’s not okay just to be kind of like, well that’s, that’s outside my authorization. Yeah. So I’m just not even gonna, I’m not even gonna dabble there and things like that. Um, but I’m sure you see lots of things like that, Alan.

Alain:                No, no. Look, I, it’s, yes. I mean, look, I wanna talk today about, um, the, uh, I wanna talk about this idea of getting a consumer on the call. Many of your listeners, many of many [00:09:00] in in the protection industry will buy these, what they call hot keys, which is pre-packaged transfers. You know, for the most part I think they’re extremely dangerous. And we can talk about what they are and why they want, you know, where we get to. Um, and I wanna talk about this cold calling cause I think this is Yeah, this is exactly, um, you know, I’ve shared it with you, Kathryn. We’ve done some research into cold calling. GDP was a huge, you know, this, this, this, this cookie stuff. Actually, before we go there, signing up with a fake date of birth is a great [00:09:30] idea by the way, because I do, I do this on everything and I’ve tweaked about this before.

Alain:                It means that when you go to your personal email, more often than not there’s someone wishing me a happy birthday. It’s really sort of, it’s a really positive thing every morning. Oh, well, we wanna give you this happy birthday message and this discount. Um, and the answer is, you’re entirely right. They don’t need to know your date of birth if you’re signing up to get, buy some beer or, you know, enter a prized or they don’t need to know. But, but back to this, this, this sort of more wider point, You know, we spent all this time enforcing GDPR [00:10:00] and cooking disclaimers and notices, but we left alone this idea of, actually, do you have my consent to call me? Um, and actually, are you being explicitly clear now? There are some stuff, some stuff coming down the track, um, that we can get into in this podcast that we, I think that’s going to change over the next 12 months.

Alain:                I think you’re see much more enforcement action on this idea of do you have your consent to call me back? One of the big things, and I’ve heard this so many times working with [00:10:30] sort of mortgage and and life insurance intermediaries, um, for the last more than a decade, is people will buy a lead and they’ll say, Well, that, that consumer’s mine now to do, to do, to do what I want with, um, that couldn’t be more wrong. And there was a fine just recently for a business who, uh, a financial services firm who bought a load of leads and then put those leads into their marketing funnel and subscribed those consumers to their, to their sort of regular communications. They’re gotta find up a hundred thousand pounds. You know? Wow. You, [00:11:00] if, if you are buying a lead, what you are buying is essentially, um, you, you’re answering a service request.

Alain:                The consumer wants a quote for life insurance. You’ve bought the right to, to service that lead. And to give that consumer a quote, if that consumer says actually to expensive, don’t want it, and you call that consumer back. Yeah. Um, uh, in six months time, you’re in breach of, of, of ICO regulations. New gates are fine. So I think one of the things we need to think about [00:11:30] lead gen and is that if you’re buying leads, you, you, you are buying the sales opportunity to that consumer at that moment or over a reasonable moment. Um, you are not buying data. And this is where I think there are gonna be some very large casualties, um, both insurers, um, both in distributors, um, who are gonna caught out by a changing, a changing sort of regime.

Kathryn:           No, absolutely. Cause I mean, I know what you’re saying there as well, like this whole thing about consent [00:12:00] saying, you know, ki where we get quite a lot of our, um, communications online, and I remember with GDPR and everything, it was an absolute minefield as well. Cause its kinda like, so hang on a minute. You know, so we can’t say tick this box to opt out of having a communicate. It was more like, you have to tick this box to opt in for me doing, you know, it was like an even extra layer of consent. Yeah. And, and it seems strange how sometimes, and I think that’s probably what you know, you definitely see as well is that there, there’s these such fine barriers between sort [00:12:30] of what you do. So it give us a website. It’s very, very clear in a sense. I should be very clear to your IT people and your data protection people, what you can and can’t do on those forms in terms of communications with clients. But if you are buying in leads and things like that, it kind of, it, it blurs where that responsibility lies. And I know you’ve done some really key research recently, haven’t you, on the data control, um, matches report all about these things like consumer consent and, and you’ve got some fab statistics in there as well. That’s, uh, it’d be great if you could share [00:13:00] some.

Alain:                Yeah. Listen, we, we, uh, thank you. We, we, you know, we took the view that we were talking about. We, we are making the case to industry at large, both financial services and non-financial education, whatever, that they need to take the consent of their consumers seriously. But we realized, you know, we’re not, not sat here in the, in a pulpit, right? We, we actually, we needed to go and do some actual consumer research. So we asked 5,000 consumers about their experiences of getting a quote online from a furniture services [00:13:30] provider, but also what they feel about phone calls and results are, are absolutely staggering in the sense that most people, uh, the average person in this country will get, get between five and 10 cold calls a year. That’s 193 million if you wanna extrapolate the data out a year. And these, and these, these half million interruptions every single day range from anything to the, the PMI policy that you just said through to, you know, trying to sell you double glazing or, or a new driveway. But I

Kathryn:           Keep getting text messages, [00:14:00] I keep getting text messages about a car. It’s just like, you were interested in this car, Jasmine. And I’m like, No, I’m no, and I’m not Jasmine. You know, and I’m just like, it’s

Alain:                Just like, look, and some of them is stupid, right? Some of them exact are stupid. Like this is just, this is just being, you’re just mass marketing me in terms of a restaurant. I want them do. But some are, and we know, we both know about, we’ve talked about this before in terms of especially during the pandemic. Uh, some of them are predatory calls. Yeah. Aiming at, you know, aiming at trying to trick vulnerable people [00:14:30] or just trying to trick, confuse people. And the life insurance example is really a good one in terms of I can save you money on your life insurance policy. Yeah. That we, we’ve got to get to a point I think where that is not able to happen. No insurer should be putting that business on risk. If you, if I’ve, if I’ve called, called you and I’ve, I can save you money and I’m a busy consumer and I’ve said, Yes, yes, yes.

Alain:                All right, let’s get it done. That business should not be going on risk and that, that that mortgage business should not be going, that that debt [00:15:00] management plan, whatever it might be. I think we need to get to the stage where, uh, every, you know, every phone call of that sort of sensitive nature, the consumer must have consented to be called back. And I think why it’s dangerous is exactly the, the example that you gave earlier. You know, if that’s not going on in a regulated fashion, if, if a lead generator, and I’m using that in the broadest terms, if a lead generator’s job is just to ring a load of data that they’ve bought from someone known source and get one hit out of every 50 that turns into a life insurance hockey [00:15:30] transfer. Yeah. They’re selling that life. They’re selling that hockey transfer to a, to a life insurance broker who then is none the wiser.

Alain:                They don’t know where that’s come from. Yeah. Um, but in the example that you gave, it’s, it’s, you know, it creates, it creates a, a lot of problems. So the research that the report will be out sort of, uh, early this, early this month, um, in October, um, and what we’ve done gone through is we’ve gone through each sector and we’ve gone through describing what people feel like when they get a cold call, what it makes them, why they, they’re, they’re [00:16:00] more likely to cancel, why they, uh, how, how they feel about that process. And we’re trying to, I guess we’re trying to show the industry at large that this is something that we need to do to, to deal with now the consumer duty, uh, which is all gonna be our in our lives, you know, very, it’s in our lives right now, but it’s gonna be in our lives by the end of October.

Alain:                Cause your marketing plans have to be ready by the end of October. The will see them, uh, consumer duty is gonna say very, very clearly that you have to have oversight over where your leads are coming from. Now [00:16:30] that oversight is not oversight, you know, Oh, well Bob, Bob, Bob sells me leads, and they’re, they’re all cool. That obs oversight has to be like, how have you inputted into the design of that website, into the, the consent of that website? What terms and conditions of the consumer seeing? And every firm is gonna be expected to answer the question, where are your leads coming from? And what adverts are is that consumer seeing? And that’s, that I think’s going to be a big shift. Now, I listened, I listened with interest to, to Tom Bakery, uh, on, on, on a, [00:17:00] your podcast last month. And, and Tom’s right, in the sense that this all hinges on enforcement. Yes. So, uh, this is all hinges on the fca, consumer duty, uh, the fca under the consumer GD saying, Okay, 10 firms show us where your leads are coming from. Uh, oh, you can’t, Right. We’re going to take the appropriate action against you. So I think, but, but, but I, from what I’ve seen so far, I think the FCA here about this,

Kathryn:           That’s really, really positive. I was gonna say, I’ll probably say something that, um, isn’t [00:17:30] the most popular things. Um, but like you were saying about enforcements now Absolutely. Because as again, many people know I, I’m an advisor, but I do many different things. And one thing I do is compliance service site in KI as well. Um, and I know full well that if I want something doing, it’s like I can do the nice, nice approach of I’d like you to start writing this and including this in the reports to eventually write you doing it. Um, and if you don’t do it, then x, y, that kind of thing. But I think a clear thing [00:18:00] for me and you saying, you know, there’s all this about, you know, and we’re talking about self-regulation of firms in a sense that to sort of say to the ffc, prove to the fca, but like what you were saying, these things should never go missing.

Kathryn:           Now this might not be popular. However, for me, and I, I’ve said this a couple of times in the past, I really feel that insurers have a responsibility here as well. I feel like insurers should do spot checks, at least, um, on firms that they use, um, and are prepared to have agencies for and say to them, Right, we’re gonna do a spot check [00:18:30] check. You’ve got, I don’t know, a week, two weeks to show us your processes on where your leads are coming from and how you know that they are legitimate. Because ultimately, as with anything, you know, a firm can do, sort like when I’m doing our best or we’re doing this, or we didn’t realize, and you know, at first, I don’t know, maybe it’d be a slap on the list at first, and then they can just start doing something different. But ultimately, when we are talking about positive consumer outcomes, I’m, I’m very much of the opinion that it’s always, um, [00:19:00] you can’t ever have anything isolated. So you can’t have advisors in one place and insurers in one. It needs to be interconnected to make sure it’s working right.

Alain:                And lead generators, I think that’s absolutely everyone who’s, it’s everyone who’s making money from this chain, right? That, that exactly

Kathryn:           Everybody needs to be making. Right? So if, you know, if somebody, if an insurer speaks to company X and they say, Well, we’re using lead generator y, then that insurer to me should have very clear access to, um, lead generator y to say, Right, [00:19:30] so what are your processes? What are you doing? Um, so that we can make sure across the chain, because I, I always think, you know, from an advisor point of view as well, is, you know, everybody gets lots of rules thrown at them and everything. And you know, that’s, that’s always gonna be the case. But I always think with this side of things, I think it’s not just about the advisors, because as well with anything, you’re gonna get advisors who do it, right. And you’re gonna get advisors who do it wrong, and the ones who do it wrong are gonna try and find some way to make what they’re doing Sound right. <laugh>. And I think, well, there needs to [00:20:00] be someone else there. So, so maybe that’s, um, might not be popular, but that would be my call. My call will be for insurer was to step in and, uh, do their bit as well with it.

Alain:                Well, if I don’t, I don’t mind saying, So I, I have briefed a number of insurers over the last two months. Uh, you know, you get, because of what I do, you get asked to sort of brief senior leadership teams. And I’ve also, um, briefed Alexa the industry debt body. Um, and I think for the first time, I, you know, I don’t wanna, I don’t want to, uh, be in discrete, [00:20:30] but I think for the first time, uh, properly, a number of insurers are waking up to this because of a number of issues over the last 12 months of quite obviously misleading lead generation forms causing firm insolvency and causing higher lapse rates. So I think actually it is higher, You know, I also as well as, as well as, as well as being involved with politics, I, well involved with lead generation, I’ve also been involved in sort of broadly with politics [00:21:00] over the last 10 years.

Alain:                And I think one, one of the things that, one of the things that, uh, the similarities between politics and life insurance is, uh, there’s a lot of good, there’s got a lot of well-intentioned good initiatives out there, but because the size of the industry, um, and, and the same with politics. Cause the size of the problem, it’s so slow. Like we all know, we all know what we should have been doing about energy. We also know what we should have been doing about cost of living and, and various things. But it just takes time. And I think, yeah. You know, we’ve been on this campaign for three years [00:21:30] now, and I think actually there’s some really good movement with insurers who are beginning to realize that there’s a correlation between that dodgy Facebook advert that that, that, you know, is promising all sorts. And then what they then see with the amount of insolvency on the back end and that, that’s, Look, we are, I think I’d like to paint a much sort of better picture for you actually in terms of, we did a, we did a, for, for a major insurer about two years ago we did an audit of the lead generation sector and we found about 200 [00:22:00] lead gen firms were producing protection leads.

Alain:                Right. Um, now I think that number’s more like one 50 and it’s going to keep shrinking. And the reason it’s gonna keep shrinking is because intermediaries and insurers are getting tougher with the sorts of firms that they work with. So there are more questions being asked. So we work really closely with a number of lead gen firms who are integrated with data. And I’ll tell you, like, I’ve never known a more detailed compliance conversation [00:22:30] going on than the one we just had of the last two months with lead generators saying, What do I need to do to be ready for consumer duty? Now all of all of contact state clients are asking their lead generators, Right. You know, we’re gonna go into some proper deep dive into your advertising in your landing pages. Like this stuff is going on. It might not, I know that there’s a offered a plumber to sort of blame lots on leg gen, but what I would say to your listeners is the change in what’s going on to the hood has been remarkable [00:23:00] over the last, over the last year or so.

Alain:                And what you’ve got now is you’ve got probably 30 or 40 lead generation firms who on the whole, are directly authorized and not exclusively, who are actually going to take the line share of the market. They’re going to, they’re gonna professionalize, they’re gonna be much more like old fashioned ad agencies in the sense that, you know, you won’t just get a knocking to LinkedIn door and say, Oh, here, I’m here to sell you leads. There will be an accepted 30 or 40 lead generators who generate Yeah. Leads that, that they’re happy [00:23:30] to share the consumer duty, sorry, the consumer journey. They’re happy to share the adverts. They, they’re very clear with the consumer what happens next. That’s where we’re evolving to the sector is professionalizing. Um, and, but it’s all gotta happen in tandem. And insurer who will nameless had a very frank conversation with, I said, Well, look, if you wanted to change this, you could insist to your, to your and distributors to tell you exactly where all their leads come from.

Alain:                Yeah. And they said to me, no word of life said to me, if [00:24:00] we did that, we would lose them. They would simply go to another insurer. So this isn’t, this isn’t, uh, this isn’t, this isn’t, um, this is a commercial question here as well. It’s not just a Yeah. It’s not just a, it’s not just a, you know, a compliance question. It, there’s a, there’s a commercial reality here, which is, um, everyone’s got to move together. Yes. And, and I think with like with podcast like this, all the work you, you clearly do, there’s an understanding now that this has got that we are professionalizing now. I think that the point that [00:24:30] I, you know, bang on about is that a consumer understands where they’re applying and then gets treated properly in that data process is not just a compliant lead. That means you’re not gonna get a fine, it’s also one that’s not gonna cancel.

Alain:                It’s also one that you’re gonna be able to have a better conversation with. It’s also one that you’re gonna be able to go back to and have. And so all of these things like consumers who know what’s gonna happen to the next, uh, are actually better at, and we’ve got the stats to prove it. We can sh we can show what compliant certified leads look [00:25:00] like six months down the line, uh, compared to cancellation rates of consumers that are sort of hassle onto the phone. It’s good for business. And I think that’s the, it’s not just a, it’s not just the regulator trying to make your life difficult. It’s actually, it’s actually a good reason to do this.

Kathryn:           Yeah, no, I completely agree as well, because, you know, I think, again, from, if you’re an advisor, you know, it’s like if you, if you’re a true advisor kind of mentality and business and everything, then you, in many ways, you don’t often want those facets in a sense because of the fact that, like you said, they don’t stay, You [00:25:30] know, and there’s no, I don’t wanna say loyalty from the customers side of thing, but you know, in my, my head, I’m trying, I’m trying to think of a better word that isn’t loyalty. But, you know, you build as an advisor, you build a rapport with your client. You remember them, you remember things about their lives, they then remember you. If it’s a fast lead, then they’ve got no, they’ve got no reason to stay. It’d be like, you know, doing your car insurance online or something if it’s super fast, they don’t know.

Kathryn:           You never gonna remember your name, not remember the conversations. And, and you don’t want that because again, there’s a number of reasons. It’s that [00:26:00] one very easy for when their data suddenly is, you know, it’s like picked up again by someone else. They’ll just jump to the next person who’s prepared to, I dunno, do something else to make it slightly cheaper for them. You know, there’s, there’s so many reasons not to go down that route. And I think, you know, it’s really important you say as well, you know, when you say lead gen firms, the <inaudible>, you know, doom and gloom and everything, you know, there are very, very legitimate lead firms. It’s just from an advisor point of view, incredibly important to soft. Like be really asking those questions of where are these coming from? Yeah. We [00:26:30] think this is a legitimate firm. Have we actually done the due diligence to really double check this is a legitimate firm, not just sort of, but we’ve used them because you know, Sally, that we’ve known for 10 years also uses them, You know, kind of thing.

Kathryn:           Have we really taken the steps there to make sure that everything is going exactly as we want it to be? I know you said as well that in terms of like the, um, targeting especially the vulnerable and, and potentially the elderly as well. I mean, that’s the key thing that, again, it stands out for me with my mom. So my mom has, um, a [00:27:00] number of different health conditions and she gets very, very anxious now about phone calls. And so I do a lot of the stuff for her in a sense, and, um, and, and different things. And she even, she’s got to a stage now and it really goes against her in terms of her kind of like her personality. If she’s now a stage of kind of going to be, no thank you, I really don’t want that, thank you very much, kind of thing, and going to put the phone down and it’s, she ends up in that thing of sort of like, she either puts the phone down and then she feels horrendously guilty for a long time that she’s put the phone down on someone or they put the [00:27:30] phone down on her when they realize they’re not gonna like, win her over.

Kathryn:           And then she’s just like, How can people be so rude? You know, kind of, you know, and I’m exactly the same, but with my mom, it actually, it really, it can massively affect somebody and their, their health, you know, for, for quite a bit. And you know, we’ve had it as well. And I think another one, um, I’m sure I’ve used this as an example before on an episode, and I think it’s a good one to bring it in here as well. So we had somebody that we had arranged life and critical illness for and [00:28:00] um, and, you know, everything was fine, but, you know, and it was all done, dusted and everything. And this person had a health condition that meant it had been very, very tricky to get the Crohn, um, to get the CRI covered. I think they had Crohn’s. So it was very, the way that their health was very, very tricky to get it.

Kathryn:           And we got it for them. And then we had it where, I think it was about, it was less than a year later or something. We suddenly get it, all the cancellation notifications in and stuff like that. And we’re thinking, what’s gone on? So we got in touch and everything, and this person will, I’ll be honest, [00:28:30] they weren’t particularly pleased with us when we got on the phone with them because they said, You, you’ve pulled a fast one on me and all this kind of stuff. And we ended up eventually realizing that again, their data from somewhere had been sold, they’d been contacted and someone had said, Oh, well you are paying this amount here, we can get it for you for a third. And what the other firm had done, um, instead of life and critical illness cover, they tried to convince them, Oh, they had convinced them that terminal illness cover, which is part of life insurance, was in fact critical illness [00:29:00] cover.

Kathryn:           So they said they could do light for life policy for a third of the price. It was less than a third for the price, I think. So anybody who’s very familiar with those products will know how immensely different they are. And, and we were in a really tough situation because again, you’ve got a scammer there who’s doing something, you know, dodgy with the leads and everything with that data. You’ve got someone who obviously is thinking, Why have I been paying all this money? How dare you have done this when I could have had it for this price to then genuinely be saying to somebody, Yeah, yeah. And we, you know, we went through it all and [00:29:30] we started saying, Please. And we just kept saying to them, Please, if you don’t ever use us again, if you don’t wanna speak to us again, whatever you want to do, fine, read the documents.

Kathryn:           This is what you had, this is what you have now. Read them, please. And they came back to us, I think within a few days. And they were modified. Yeah, sure. Modified, um, very upset. And the reason I wanna say this as well, and the reason I bring this story up is that this wasn’t a vulnerable person, you know, this was just, I wanna say, you know, just someone, it [00:30:00] was just someone like the rest of us. They had, uh, I think they were probably in a bit like a management position. They had a job, they had a family, they were just like any one of us, but they’d been caught out by that phone call that said, Well, it’s, it should only be a third of the price. And they immediately just were drawn by it. So it doesn’t have to be, you know, this isn’t necessarily saying that this is clients of, um, certain sort of like conditions or certain like academic ability or anything like that. This can be literally anybody. And [00:30:30] I guess again and again, you just, you’ll see that far more than the most, I imagine seeing all these kind of practices. Uh,

Alain:                You do. I mean, and that’s something that the, the, the research pulls out. It says that 48% of the people that get a cold call are angry. You know, when you’re talking about 193 million cold calls a year, that’s what our research puts at half a million a day. You know, that’s a lot of angry people. And, and, and you don’t have to, these people are taking, the cold calling idea is you have to be successful, [00:31:00] want them every hundred times to work, right? Oh, wow. And that’s why, and that’s why that’s a lot of data to be churning through to find that funnel personal or that person who’s not on top of their finances to say, Okay, yeah, I, you know, I should be, I should, It’s why consent and consent is the thing that underpins all of this. It’s why consent is so important.

Alain:                I should have your consent to call you back and make my sale. And why that’s so important is because as sort of assumed in that consent conversation is that you have the training and [00:31:30] the regulation and the, the wherewithal to actually prop treat me properly. If you haven’t got my consent and I, and, and, and you call me outta the blue, you’re quite literally anybody. And I think that’s the thing. If I could make any sort of plea or any sort of, uh, you know, way to speed this thing up and get it easier is if it’s all, if all distributors had to prove all distributors and insurers had to prove that the consumer has consented to be called back for this sales conversation overnight, you [00:32:00] could make a dramatic amount of difference. And I think, yes. One of the things that we are saying to the industry at large, not just the protection industry, is, uh, you know, we do a lot of work in equity release, for example, and that’s some where in terms of vulnerable, more elderly people Yes.

Alain:                Are making massive decisions about perhaps, perhaps life changes is about the money they’re borrowing. That’s one we’re working very closely with the equity release council to make this a principle to say, if you are gonna buy an equity release lead, that consumer must have consented to that conversation. And you must have proof that that of [00:32:30] what, of what they’ve seen on that journey. And I think, you know, this is a long, this is a long journey, Kathryn. It’s not gonna happen overnight. Uh, I know, I know. People get frustrated about it and wanna change it, and that’s, you know, but it, it’s something that we are, you know, working very, very carefully and seriously on about how you set a stand. The fca, consumer duty talks about sludge design, uh, that all, any advisor in their own marketing, any regulated firm in their own marketing or any external marketing [00:33:00] for which they mean lead generation, has to challenge sludge design.

Alain:                And our sludge design is, is where, uh, I get you to sign up for a prize draw, right? And say, you might win 5,000 pounds and I call you back and say, Here’s life insurance. Or Right. It’s where I trick you into applying for something. Or I, I tell you something that’s not true. Like, for example, on your page, I’ll tell you that you’ve been selected for a, a mortgage, but actually I’m just trying to get you to think that’s sludge design. And so I think one of the things that I’m personally very interested to see how the regulator [00:33:30] deals with now, it, it’s very high bar. It’s how they challenge sludge design. Because if they wanna work on it, there’s some good examples and good, good things that we could do to actually make such design go away. So for example, one of the things that I would like to see is, I’d like to see on the, on a landing page, when you apply it, when you, when you landed on a lead generation advert and you, you’re about to fill in the details, I wanna see in that terms of condition notice, I wanna see exactly [00:34:00] what’s gonna happen to the consumer next.

Alain:                You’re gonna be called back by an FCA authorized, uh, intermediary. But I wanna see the name of the intermediary that’s making the call. I wanna know that it’s X or Y I wanna, and that’s the asa is the advertising standard authority is getting quite close to that in terms of making that man it has, and I could, I could honestly believe for three, five hours, four or hours about the regulation about, but they’ve got the, their latest rulings are around lead generation websites, that app outside of [00:34:30] the, their purpose. Yeah. By what they mean by that they’re saying is you’re pretending to be a broker, but actually you’re, you’re just trying to sell data. Yeah. So, and you are gonna see over the next six months, um, disclaimers appearing on lead generation websites, which basically say, I’m a lead generator, I connect you to my clients who are authorized directly authorized lead gen terms. We get paid a fee for that. Yeah. All is good. And, and, and that, that’s brilliant. That’s what that’s, you know, there are, there are so many talented lead generations out there who do a brilliant job for their clients, and [00:35:00] we’ve got a level, the playing field so that, you know, they’re not undercut by scammers.

Kathryn:           No, absolutely. I’ll just, um, quickly, uh, jump back a second from what you were saying then bring it back to psych. I wanna ask something about the data side. So, um, so the thing you mentioned about the equity release, Now I don’t do equity release, but that is something that I’m really keen about as well because, um, my dad has Parkinson’s and I do quite a bit with the Parkinson’s uk. And one of the key things for me is that there were a lot of people with health condition light Parkinson’s, who start to look towards equity release because they needed to make [00:35:30] adaptations to the home. Lots of different things. And one of the key problems is, is that they, a lot of the time, and I’m not saying that they necessarily have to speak to a financial advisor, but to get access to a financial advisor, they don’t often have the amount of assets that, and, and a full financial advisor would require for them to be a client.

Kathryn:           And so to me, that’s a key area that I’m very, very passionate about. Um, it’s just the fact of, Right, If they can’t, if they can’t, if they’re not financially in the [00:36:00] position for a financial advisor to say, Yes, you will take you on, what can we do? Because it’s not fair, You know, they’re already, it’s, I think it’s something like, um, I saw some statistics within its part, my training I do as well. And it’s something like, people with Parkinson’s are automatically 16,000 pounds worse off each year compared to other people because of the amount of things that are doing instead of medications, all the appointments, so many other things, inability to work and stuff like that. So, so I’m really glad to see that that’s part of it as well. Yeah. Um, so in terms of data, so this will be [00:36:30] something that, you know, I’m sure you can give me insight on as well, is that when we do get a cold call or when we get in that text message and things like that, how have they got our data? Because I, you know, I certainly, I don’t put my details in everywhere and anywhere. And as I say, sometimes I’m lying about what, you know, information about myself. Um, so generally my birthday’s always the 1st of January of some random year at some point. Yeah. But again, on social media, I’ll sometimes get actually birth down. I’m thinking why I want, you know, it’s just like, no, [00:37:00] it’s not. Um, where do they get it from? I, I don’t even understand where they’re getting it from.

Alain:                In the most unlikely of places that you probably haven’t considered in the sense that, uh, shopping websites that you may, may use just once and you fill a phone number in, um, uh, emails that you, you put in that are then sold onto other data brokers who are then trying to build a picture [00:37:30] of you. It’s not, you know, advertising in that sense. It’s if someone wants to email you or, or, or, or write you a letter or various things. I think these, these are different types of advertising techniques from me ringing you up and saying, I’ve got a better life insurance deal for you. You should take it. I think one of the big problems, and we’re talking about protection here, one of the big problems about with protection data is the amount of, [00:38:00] of, um, Excel spreadsheets that go walking out of brokerages and intermediaries.

Alain:                You leave the firm, you export the details with you, you go to a new firm, guess what, I’ve got a thousand new clients for you to call. That’s a problem. And it’s a problem that actually the industry doesn’t really talk about in general, but it happens a lot. And one of the reasons there is, I think as an industry, the, the data practices are often quite poor actually, in terms of who has access to [00:38:30] what and, and how much data and where it’s coming from. One of the things that, you know, one of of the things that we we’re doing right now is we are automating, um, the way that feedback data is given to lead generators. Because look, I kid you not, there’ll be listeners right now listening to your podcast who will send data feedback to lead generation partners in Excel, in an Excel spreadsheet, or let say, here’s all your, here’s all your date, here’s your, your feedback.

Alain:                The last three months consumer feedback, what’s [00:39:00] happened, The, the, the the, the potential for leakage there is clearly so significant. Yeah. What we, what we are doing with a number of firms is we’ve built a sort of almost private anonymized data feedback sharing loop where, so, so an intermediary can still feed back to their lead generation partner, but it’s done in, in a secure anonymous fashion rather than here’s an Excel spreadsheet you got. So I think, I think one of the things that I would like to see, um, which could really challenge this, [00:39:30] this sort of leaky data, is for insurers as well as asking for a medical and the various compliance questions that you all have to ask voice to put on a risk. I want an insurer to ask as part of that risk conversation, where has this consumer applied? What landing has their pages they applied?

Alain:                And what level of oversight do you have on that consumer? And that then might lead into, well actually, you know, we, we certify everything they do, or we run this process, or we run [00:40:00] this process. Theca is so unusually un, I mean, I’ve been following this sort of regulation for a while now. They’re so unusually crystal clear on what they think consumer Gigi means for advertising. You have to have, if you are buying leads, if you are, if you’re working with the marketing agency, you have, you the buyer has to have, have to have full oversight and audit over what’s going on. And I listened to Tom, you know, you and Tom talking about mystery shopping. Yeah. It means mystery shopping. It means going onto that website and checking that that [00:40:30] is actually the landing page that you’re getting leads from. Yeah. Now a goodly generator is gonna share that with you. They’re gonna share everything with you. They’re gonna show you the adverts, they’re gonna show you everything. Cause that’s just the way this is evolving. Um, but that’s, that, that’s what I want. That’s what I want the industry to do at large. I want them to make the application to get a call back almost as important as the medical, show me where the leaders come from.

Kathryn:           No, absolutely. I was gonna say, and just so from that as well, that just takes me back to something you said earlier, which concerned me a little bit when the insurer [00:41:00] was sort of like saying, Well, if we do that, everyone will leave. I’m thinking, But then you surely wouldn’t want those people writing business under your name in a sense. And it’s, you know, there’s so many, I mean, you know, there’s, you know, there are very, very key firms who are writing, you know, clearly each, each insurer has sort like a number of firms that are writing huge amounts of business with them. Yeah. You know, and, and you know, there’s not gonna want to be relationships that are gonna want to be, you know, but then it’s a case of, well, let’s not, it’s, it’s, I kind of think, well, [00:41:30] it’s not, don’t ask, it’s Yeah, ask and then let’s figure out how to make it work kind of thing. And

Alain:                Let me, let me give you an example. Like, so, so we work with, we work with Axa, one of our, one of our sort of largest partners. And you know, I’ve worked with for about three years. And that was one of the conversations we had early on with them where they said to us, or Alan, you want us to install, uh, integrate contact state so that we’ve, we have oversight of all our lead generation partners. What do we do if they say no? And I said, Well, [00:42:00] what do you think you should do? Like, do you think, do you wanna buy leads from a lead generator who won’t share their landing pages? Do you know, what do you think? And, and, and like, you know, for such a large organization act understood it immediately. Like Yeah, of course we’re not gonna buy leads unless we can see exactly where it’s coming from.

Alain:                Yeah. And that’s, you know, in, in an answer to your question, that’s the sort of, that’s the message that I always give to, to, to clients new and, and current is it’s not about whether they will or they won’t. It’s that you’ve got three [00:42:30] separate regulatory bodies who are mandating that you have oversight over where your leads are coming from. And actually it’s good for business and actually, you know, you should be spending more with those lead generators who, who are willing to be part of your organization and have skin the game. Um, and that’s, by the way, that’s the way I see this sector going. Yeah. It’s not gonna be about, you know, Hey Kathryn, can I sell you 10 leads? It’s gonna be <laugh>, I wanna be, I wanna be part of your advertising for six months. Yeah. What do we need to enable that? And that’s the sort of sensible, progressive, you [00:43:00] know, uh, way in which leg gen’s gonna go.

Kathryn:           Wouldn’t it be so lovely not to get those LinkedIn messages? Right?

Alain:                It would be

Kathryn:           So

Alain:                Look, let tell I I get them. It’s like that shows you how, how, how little like my, in my literal LinkedIn profile, I, I I describe how I’m trying to separate cold call Legion to genuinely, and I still get cold call Legion. Yeah. I got a very large, I won’t name names. I’ve got a very large financial services network who targeted me on Friday. They added me on LinkedIn. They said, Oh, we’d like to, we’d [00:43:30] like to review your investment pension. My replied, I said, Look, I’m not gonna be one of those guys, but you’ve just cold called me for an, you’ve essentially cold called me for an investment process. This is, you’re breaking all manner of like ICO rules. Like what are you doing? And also, if you’re gonna do that, I just suggest that I’m not the guy you do that to, but I haven’t had a reply. I waited for reply, you know? Yeah. So,

Kathryn:           No, I think, I think I’ve had similar before with people of contact me [00:44:00] say, just wondering, you know, I really feel like I should review your life insurance. I’m like, <laugh>. And it’s just like, okay, did you actually look at anything to do with me? You know, it’s just like, can you make it even any more clearer that you’ve just gone along your own connect, connect, connect, connect, connect.

Alain:                Hey, but hey, listen, that, that’s what I was saying earlier about cold calling, right? Like, I think when you get a cold call, you feel like you’ve been the victim of a targeted campaign. Yeah. You haven’t, It’s just that they’re spanning so many people to get that one, that one point, and that there’s both positive and negative in that. And that, okay, your [00:44:30] data hasn’t been elite, but also they’re looking for vulnerability. And that I think is the most sort of pernicious part of this is that they’re looking for someone vulnerable. You know?

Kathryn:           Do you think, um, sorry, heading towards the end of the podcast, but do you think that, um, with the cost of living crisis and how we could find that people are more reluctant to maybe be buying new things right now, just trying to save money? Do you think that we might actually see some firms starting to turn towards more a bit, maybe being a [00:45:00] bit more lax about their review of where leads are coming from and in, in a, you know, in a sense that people could start to maybe get a little bit desperate in to try and just make sure that they, they reach their targets and things like that?

Alain:                I can’t believe I’m gonna say this. Um, I, I’ve got a big birthday next year, which means that I, um, I’m old enough to remember the last, uh, crash financial services crash, uh, late two thousands. And what [00:45:30] was a hallmark of the way the economy changed last time with a essential recession and rising mortgage quotes, was the proliferation of high APR lending, uh, significant paid loan lending. And that sector had a boom and a bus, if you remember. So post 2008, you know, it got to a significant 2015 that you had these businesses with these huge valuations because the way that they’d essentially preed upon vulnerable people mm-hmm. <affirmative>. Um, and that came largely from a [00:46:00] sort of desperation and cold calling culture. Um, people thinking that they could just borrow a paid loan, 500% apr, and then pay it back. That’s a long way of answering your question, which is yes, undoubtedly yes.

Alain:                What we’re gonna see over the next year is predatory capital, predatory capital for people that are just struggling to make ends meet, to pay energy bills, pay food costs, pay, you know, rising, battling low, low wages in high inflation. Um, people, that’s what’s going to [00:46:30] happen. Um, I’m, I’m sad, I don’t, I don’t wanna talk into recession, but it’s clear that we are in, certainly for a bit of, bit of realignment, and this is where regulator needs to earn their money. This is where, this is why we have a financial regulator, a data regulator, advertis regulator this time around. We need to make sure that we protect those who are vulnerable from otherwise predators. And so, um, so yes, I, I sadly think you are, we are gonna see an increase in this level of, [00:47:00] um, of targeting. And I think it’s up to us as a society and up to us as a financial services industry to more tightly regulate Yeah. Um, this sort of predatory capital.

Kathryn:           Absolutely. Do you want to leave listeners with a bit of sort of like some key thoughts or something, you know, if they’re an advisor and, um, they are now sort of thinking, Hang on a minute, where our leads coming from? What would be kind of like, what be your suggestions to sort like for people to, uh, to [00:47:30] have a really good review of where they’re getting their leads?

Alain:                Yeah. No, no, great question. I, if you’re an advisor, small or big, start thinking about lead generation, not as buying leads, but as a marketing function. Uh, where you might hire, hire a market to do your own website. So if you’re a small advisor, get together with five or 10 other other advisors who need leads and form some level of, you know, network or coalition so that you have greater buying power. And one of the things [00:48:00] that lead generators love is they love big firms because they can, they can generate lots of leads and, uh, they’ll all be bought by the big firm. And it’s one of the reasons why small advisors often miss out on good lead gen because they don’t have the buying power. So I would start, or especially if you’re part of a network, start putting pressure on your network to start thinking about how, how that approach to lead buying should work.

Alain:                Lead gen is just a sort of collective term for a consumer applying for something, right? Doesn’t mean Yeah. Doesn’t [00:48:30] mean anything other than consumer applying. So start thinking about, well actually, you know, one of the things, one of the questions, um, uh, one of the points that that, that you made in a previous podcast, uh, one of I guests made was that distributors aren’t good at doing their own marketing. Um, and various life insurance campaigns have failed because, you know, they couldn’t agree or whatever it might be. Now, I, I just don’t think that’s true. Like, the skills, the skills to generate a lead, I mean, look at [00:49:00] what, for example, like Tom and Paul and Canada are doing, you know, uh, look at what, for example, Caspi are doing, uh, in Manchester. They’ve generated their own websites and are using tactics, uh, that lead generators used to get people to, to, to sign up.

Alain:                Except cause they’re not selling those leads, they’re actually working them themselves. And so creating good marketing websites is entirely possible, Entirely possible, but you do need to have a degree of scale to make it, to make it work. And so I think if you’re a, if you’re a small or a big advisor, first of all, think about it as, as like strategically, [00:49:30] if you currently buy leads and you dunno where they come from, just be very clear in your own mind that you are in breach of a, a, a changing regulatory wave. And I think you need to go and work with lead generators who are willing to share and certify exactly how they generate those leads. You should, you should have, for every, every lead you buy, you should have a copy of the consent that that consumer has signed up to in the consumer duty.

Alain:                And look, I read, [00:50:00] I read all 500 pages, the consultation document twice. You know, I’m, I’m one of those people. Um, there was something called the private right of action, p r a, that was the, the thing. And, and in that theca were essentially gearing up to allow consumers to take their own action against fraudulent websites and fraudulent and, and, and, and companies that buy their by data fraudulently. So the example you gave, for example, uh, about someone who was mis-sold a product, the SK wanted [00:50:30] to give powers a power to the individual consumer to sue, uh, or to take action rather than do the, It was a brilliant idea and it was modeled on the T cpa, the Telephone Customer Preference Act in America, which allows individual consumers to take their own action for whatever reason. And I think there was a lot of industry lobbying against it.

Alain:                The p r a was, was, was watered out of the consumer duty. It was removed in it. There was a note that said, We will be back <laugh>, we’ll be and we’ll bring this back. And so it’s just something [00:51:00] I raise this point because we want empower individual consumers, right? We want you or I here when we’re thinking about our mortgage to see a fraudulent website and say, Right, that’s wrong. They’re offering rates that aren’t achievable. I’m gonna take action. Or, or, or rather, you’ve missold me a product, I’m gonna take action against you. I’m not trying to sort of herald the, an American that teaches society where we all sue each other. That’s not what we want. But I think, I think, um, an equity release, a mortgage, a life insurance, a pension, [00:51:30] these are the biggest investments, the biggest purchases you will make in your life.

Alain:                And we should, there should be more regulation that ensures that you can’t scan me. Um, and so I raise that point just as this regulation is changing within two years, I predict you’ll have to prove that you have the consent for every customer you speak to explicitly prove. So do it now. Get, get, get ahead of the game. And you’ll also be working with lead generations who are also same mindset and therefore are more invested in your business and want you to make sales. That’s, [00:52:00] that would be my sort of like, sort of closing thought.

Kathryn:           No, that’s absolutely brilliant. Thank you. Well, Alan, it’s been really, really insightful and, and I love some little side tangents we’ve gone on as well. Um, so thank everybody for listening, um, to Alan and his insights into the consumer duty consumer consent and, and everything else to do with what you are really gonna need to start paying attention to on the, for the consumer duty principle from the fca. It’s just really kicking in. I believe it’s next year, isn’t it, Alan? It’s, it’s

Alain:                Next year’s

Kathryn:           Preparing now for next year when it’s That’s

Alain:                [00:52:30] Next. Yeah. Yeah. The, the FCA said they want to, they want to see marketing plans by the end of October this year. Yeah. So I think that’s the thing to be aware of, but yeah, it’ll be enforced next year.

Kathryn:           Absolutely. So next time I’m gonna be back with Matt ran and when we’re talking through insurance options for people that have high cholesterol, it’s an area that I’m sure many advisors come across in the protection space. If you’d like a reminder of the next episode, please drop me a message on social media or visit the website, practical h from protection dot code at uk. And don’t forget, if you’ve listened to this as part of [00:53:00] your work, you can claim a CPD certificate on the website too. Thanks to our sponsors, the Okta members. Thank you again, Alan.

Alain:                Thank you.

Kathryn:           Bye.