We Are Winners

We are a small firm in Filey, North Yorkshire, but we are right at the forefront of change and excellence within our industry.

We are proud to finish 2023 with our 52nd award win!!!

Since 2012 we have dedicated our team to being specialists in protection insurance. With 52 wins and 13 highly commended awards behind us, we think we have certainly managed to achieve our goal.

We were thrilled to be named the Protection Intermediary of the Year at the Protection Review 2023 awards. Our team member Rheanna attended the evening at the Landmark Hotel in London and was very proud to go up an collect our award to the Charleston theme tune. A lovely nod from the Protection Review team for mine and Alan’s charity Charleston in September for our local hospice.

We won this award in part due to our:

• Dedication to build a strong financial basis to our company, focusing upon long-term gains rather than short-term rewards.
• The importance that we place upon life insurance policies being placed into Trust to give our clients extra protection.
• That we successfully launched an online quotation and purchase system for some life insurance products for our clients, with other firms looking to use this for their own clients.
• Our position as a market leader in supporting other advisers to insure their clients.

We had another incredible win at the Protection Review Awards with our Client Relationship Manager Krystle Skelton, winning Individual Protection Adviser of the Year 2023.

Krystle won this award for:

• Her work in building and driving forward a client management system where she reviews existing clients policies on an annual basis. Through her knowledge and experience she is able to quickly determine if there are more competitive insurances for the client, to then reach out an arrange this for them.
• Ensuring that everyone of clients is contacted on at least an annual basis, to remind them of their insurances and check if their circumstances have changed.
• Her extensive work in supporting the HIV community, challenging industry mindsets and being a key part of improvements in arranging life insurance and income protection for people across the UK.

Earlier this year at the Cover Excellence Awards we were thrilled to be receive the Excellence in Customer Services 2023 award. This was a full team effort and we are proud of everyone at Cura who helped us to achieve this.

And to make it an even better year for her, Krystle also won Intermediary of the Year 2023 at the Cover Excellence Awards too.

You already know quite a bit about what Krystle has been doing, but here are some extras:

• She showed that she had reviewed a clients policy, where they had been told they could only have 10 years of life insurance due to living with HIV and psoriatic arthritis. She replaced their life insurance with one that had an extra £100k of cover, an extra 20 years and a cheaper premium!
• She has been involved in multiple pilots for arranging income protection for people living with HIV. I am incredibly proud to say that she was the first adviser in the UK to arrange a full personal income protection policy in the UK for someone living with HIV.

I was also proud that Krystle joined us as a firm and chose not to receive a trophy for her win, and instead have the cost of the trophy donated to charity.

Educator of the Year 2023

Whilst this isn’t specifically a Cura award, it is an award that I won and it kind of sits in my consultancy and training firm Advice For Advisers. As well as being an insurance adviser I also train other advisers across the industry, to improve their knowledge and skills. I do this mainly through my podcast and training course.

I won this award because:

• At the time I had produced 82 podcast episodes with over 62 hours of dedicated protection insurance training. We are not over 100 episodes!
• At the time I had delivered over 2,500 hours of training and issued over 1,700 hours of structured CPD to colleagues in the industry.
• My work improving the industry through voluntary involvement with GAIN, the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries, and the British Insurance Brokers Association.

I hope that you have found this blog interesting and can see why we are winners. This isn’t just about knowing insurers and their product inside and out. It is also understanding medical conditions, travel, sports and high risk jobs, so that we get the best outcomes for our clients. It’s working in the personal, business and group market in the UK and internationally. It’s supporting the public, charities and other advisers to get their clients the protection that they need.

We may be small, we may be in the middle of nowhere, but we be feisty!