Niki Cooke has joined Protection Guru as chief revenue officer.
In this newly created role, Cooke will bring her experience in supporting adoption and deployment of technology to advice firms who want to be at the leading edge of innovation.
She will be working closely alongside Adam Higgs, head of research at Protection Guru, helping to increase adoption of the comparison platform and innovate its functionalities based upon adviser needs and customer requirements.
Cooke said: “I am joining Protection Guru at an exciting time after the launch of Protection Guru Pro which is designed to improve consumer outcomes and enhance adviser compliance, while at the same time increasing adviser income.
“This has attracted considerable interest from larger mortgage and wealth adviser firms, areas where I have been able to successfully help firms achieve positive change in the past.
“Our aim is to help advisers deliver the best protection advice and support networks and other large firms in meeting their consumer duty obligations as well as enabling robust repeatable advice processes across hundreds or thousands of advisers in each firm.”
Higgs added: “Niki brings outstanding expertise in client relations, having occupied senior intermediary roles at Twenty7Tec and Intelliflo.
“Niki also has valuable protection experience from her time at iPipeline. This experience, gives her the expert knowledge of the insurer and adviser markets as well as the application of technology products.”
Protection Guru founder Ian McKenna concluded: “Protection Guru was set up to help grow the protection market by providing detailed technical support to advisers. Since the launch of Protection Guru Pro an increasing number of firms have contacted us to understand how we can help put in place processes that will help more advisers give better protection advice, enhance their compliance processes, and meet their consumer duty obligations.
“When people are buying cover to protect the people they care about the most, a better outcome is usually achieved by their being given a better-quality product, rather than the cheapest option. Paying just a few pounds more frequently gives the customer far better value, thus focusing on a key consumer duty outcome. Our early experience is that they system actually pays for itself if each adviser only achieves only a £2 per month increase on one contract a month.”
