General insurance (GI) specialist Paymentshield is fast-tracking a series of technology investment, which it describes as its ‘war chest’, to help advisers battle the economic impact of Covid-19 and return to growth.

The insurance company is accelerating a series of technology investments designed to empower advisers to make data-led decisions, better support their customers and maximise the opportunities resulting from shifting market trends.

This year, it has planned improvements to its home insurance quote journey, indexed broker FAQs, use of chatbot technology and platform Adviser Hub.

The hub, which has over 78,000 registrations, is used by advisers to manage their GI performance online. Last year, those users logged in and transacted on its platform over 560,000 times.

The forthcoming enhancements to the home insurance quote journey will deliver a more streamlined user experience for advisers, with additional support embedded throughout to help advisers seize sales opportunities.

The investment builds on Paymentshield’s enhancements to the speed and accuracy of its Quick Quote tool, following its 2020 partnership with LexisNexis Risk Solutions to integrate property data.

Since then, the average price difference between a quick quote and a submitted quote has reduced from £40.47 to £23.31 – a reduction of over 40%.

Next month, Paymentshield plans to launch its adviser chatbot with tech provider Helpshift to further improve adviser’s user experience. The omnichannel technology will provide advisers with instant answers and will be seamlessly integrated with a live chat functionality to enable contact centre staff to handle complex queries.

Rob Evans, chief executive officer of Paymentshield, says: “Although 2020 will go down as a year to forget for most, it was also a year when we witnessed the best of people. The adviser community demonstrated huge resilience by pulling together, going above and beyond for customers and supporting one another.”

“We want to use technology not just to enable individual advisers to deliver more value for their business and enhance customer support, but to bring people together and create a community from which collectively advisers can grow and learn GI best practice.”

He adds: “We are hoping that by bringing forward our tech investment we can boost advisers’ confidence to continue doing what they do best: delivering true value to their customers.”