Built on experience. Shaped by adversity. Driven by a belief that things can be better.
Adviser.ai wasn't born in a boardroom or conceived by a group of technology entrepreneurs looking for an opportunity in financial services.
Its roots go back decades, through the early days of online lead generation, the growth of one of the UK's largest protection brokerages, extraordinary personal loss, and the long process of starting again.
It's a story about understanding an industry from the inside. About recognising problems that have persisted for years. And about the determination to use that experience to build something better.
"Our industry's customer engagement principles need a fundamental rethink as customer expectations and technology both continue to evolve."Luke Elden · Founder, Adviser.ai Luke's latest article Use AI where it earns its place. Not where it doesn't. Read Luke's latest thoughts
Our founder, Luke Elden, has spent much of his working life building businesses in the UK protection insurance industry.
Long before Adviser.ai existed, Luke founded Netbasic, one of the UK’s earliest and largest online lead generation businesses of its era, followed by Protected, which grew to become one of the UK’s five largest protection brokers at the time.
Through building and running these businesses, Luke gained firsthand experience of almost every aspect of protection distribution - from generating consumer enquiries and managing customer acquisition costs to converting leads into policies and maintaining profitable customer relationships. He even built insurance products alongside reinsurers.
He also came to recognise two fundamental weaknesses in the way the industry operated.
The firstHow customers were acquired in the first place. The secondWhat happened after a policy was sold.Both processes were often inefficient, expensive and poorly aligned with customers’ needs.
These weren’t problems observed from the outside. They were challenges Luke had experienced firsthand while building and operating businesses within the industry.
And they would eventually shape the vision behind Adviser.ai.
His son, Harvey, died at the age of eleven.
The loss was devastating.
In the years that followed, Luke also experienced the collapse of his business, the breakdown of his marriage, the loss of his home and severe financial difficulties.
Almost everything that had once provided stability and direction in his life disappeared.
There is no neat or uplifting way to describe losing a child. Nor is there a lesson that somehow makes such a loss worthwhile.
Some experiences don’t make us stronger. They simply change us.
For Luke, the years that followed were marked by grief, uncertainty, mistakes and the difficult process of trying to rebuild a life that could never be quite the same again.
There was no straightforward path back.
But eventually, there was a determination to start something new.
Not to recreate what had existed before, but to use the experience gained along the way to build something different.
The ambition was to use technology to address the problems he had encountered throughout his career in protection distribution.
Having built businesses on both sides of the customer acquisition process, he understood the economics of generating leads, the operational pressures facing brokers and the challenges involved in maintaining profitable customer relationships.
He also understood that many of the industry’s established processes had changed remarkably little.
Consumers could still face confusing journeys, unwanted telephone calls and repetitive questions when trying to arrange protection.
Meanwhile, once a policy had been sold, meaningful communication with the customer could become infrequent or disappear altogether.
The result was an industry that could be inefficient at both ends of the customer relationship.
Adviser.ai was founded with the ambition to address both problems.
But transforming how consumers discover, explore and purchase insurance is a complex undertaking. It requires significant technology development, commercial infrastructure and careful consideration of the regulatory environment.
Improving what happened after the sale offered a more immediate opportunity to deliver measurable benefits to distributors and their customers.
So we deliberately started there.
Not because it was the bigger problem, but because it was the more practical place to begin.
For years, protection distribution has concentrated heavily on acquiring customers and completing sales. But the relationship between a customer and their insurance provider can last for decades.
During that time, circumstances change. Customers forget what their policies cover. Their needs evolve. Questions go unanswered. Dissatisfaction develops. And too often, nobody notices until a customer cancels.
This creates a problem for everyone. Distributors lose customers and revenue. Insurers lose policies. And customers can lose valuable financial protection. We believe much of this is avoidable.
Adviser.ai developed technology to help protection distributors maintain meaningful relationships with customers after the initial sale. Through Post-Sale Checks, Benefit Reminders, Cover Reviews and Retention journeys, our platform helps businesses identify issues earlier, resolve hidden dissatisfaction, improve customer engagement and reduce avoidable cancellations.
It also creates opportunities to identify customers whose protection needs may have changed.
Our philosophy is simple. A successful protection sale shouldn’t be the end of the customer relationship. It should be the beginning.
Today, this remains the foundation of Adviser.ai’s business. But it was never the entirety of our ambition.
Explore retention Stage twoRethinking how protection customers are acquiredThe problems facing protection distribution begin long before a policy is sold. And having built one of the UK’s largest lead generation businesses of its era, followed by one of its largest protection brokerages, Luke understands those problems particularly well.
The process of acquiring a customer can be expensive, inefficient and frustrating. Consumers searching online for life insurance may encounter confusing comparison journeys, repeated requests for information and unexpected telephone calls. They can find themselves passed between lead generators, comparison services and insurance intermediaries, sometimes with little clarity about who they’re dealing with or what happens next.
Meanwhile, distributors spend substantial amounts acquiring enquiries, many of which never become customers. Significant time and money can be consumed by unsuccessful contact attempts, duplicated processes and conversations that could be handled more efficiently.
For years, these inefficiencies have been treated as an unavoidable cost of doing business. We don’t believe they have to be.
Our next stage of development focuses on using artificial intelligence and intelligent digital journeys to rethink how protection insurance is explored, understood and arranged. We envisage a process where customers can explain their needs, explore relevant options and progress at their own pace. Where technology handles routine questions and information gathering. Where customers have greater control over when and how they engage. And where human expertise remains available when it is needed.
For distributors, this creates the opportunity to reduce acquisition costs, improve conversion efficiency and concentrate valuable human resources on the parts of the journey where they make the greatest difference. For consumers, it offers the prospect of a simpler, more transparent and less intrusive experience.
We believe the future of protection distribution should be built around the customer, not the economics of generating and reselling leads.
This is the next chapter for Adviser.ai.
Explore acquisitionAlthough our development has two distinct stages, the underlying ambition has always been the same.
We want to improve the relationship between protection distributors and their customers throughout the entire lifecycle.
From the moment someone first considers insurance, through the process of exploring their options and arranging cover, to the years that follow.
We believe technology can make every stage more efficient, more transparent and more responsive.
And we believe businesses that genuinely look after their customers should be commercially stronger as a result.
Our experience has shown us that customer outcomes and commercial performance don’t have to be competing priorities.
Often, improving one helps improve the other.
Today, Adviser.ai works with established UK protection distributors, combining specialist industry knowledge with digital technology, automation and increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence.
Our existing platform helps businesses improve post-sale engagement, reduce operating costs and protect the long-term value of their customer relationships.
Our next generation of technology will extend those capabilities further into the customer acquisition and sales journey.
We believe AI will fundamentally change how protection insurance is distributed over the coming years.
But we don’t believe the answer is simply to replace people with machines.
The opportunity is to remove unnecessary friction, reduce wasted effort and create better experiences for everyone involved.
Adviser.ai has grown out of years of practical industry experience, but its story is also inseparable from the experiences of the person who founded it.
Businesses fail. Circumstances change. People experience losses that alter everything.
And sometimes, starting again is the only option.
We don’t believe adversity automatically creates wisdom or success.
But we do believe that experience, curiosity, determination and a willingness to challenge established ways of thinking can lead to something better.
That’s the spirit in which Adviser.ai was built.
We’re proud of what we’ve created, grateful to the businesses that have placed their trust in us, and excited about what comes next.
Because ultimately, our ambition is bigger than building software.
We want to help create a protection industry that works better for the businesses operating within it - and, most importantly, for the people who depend on it.