Following its Series A funding round in December 2017, parent company Gryphon Group Holdings raised £180m to build and launch Guardian. While developing the offering, Guardian has been working with advisers and rating agencies like Defaqto.
Mr Davis said: “Advisers like to be able to talk to customers about having something that’s good for them. When you have seven to eight providers giving the same type of product. it is about how you differentiate.”
Describing the proposition as "feature-rich", Mr Davis said Guardian is targeting the value end of the market and premiums are unlikely to be cheap.
“So we are not going to be the number one player. We want to be a substantial player and, actually, we believe we can be. We would like to see the market grow significantly over the next few years and support that growth.”
According to the latest Swiss Re Term & Health Watch 2018, sales of new protection policies – whole of life, critical illness (CI) and income protection (IP) – increased by 11.6 per cent in 2017.
Protection policies are now an important part of the planning agenda. The top providers are Aviva and Legal and General. The next set of big players include LV, Vitality and AIG.
Guardian is vying for a good share of the market – around 10 per cent – which Mr Davis said is still a conservative business target.
He added: “I look at historic launches: 18 years ago when Scottish Provident came to the market they got to 30 per cent market share in a couple of years. Bright Grey; when they came to the market, they got to 14 per cent after four years."
Mr Davis is not new to the Guardian brand. He previously worked for reinsurer Swiss Re after it bought Windsor Life. Swiss Re then bought Guardian, transferred the policies into its business and then left Guardian as a closed life business.
Knowing about the history of the Guardian name, which has been around since 1821, has made Mr Davis very keen to re-establish the brand in the market.
Following the whole of market launch later this summer Guardian will initially roll out term insurance and CI cover, followed by business protection, whole of life and income protection.
Mr Davis said: “When you look at the market over the last 10 or 15 years, it has been reasonably static with not a huge amount of innovation.
“A lot of the products are very similar and we felt it was an opportunity to bring a positively disruptive input into the market."
Ima Jackson-Obot is a features writer for Financial Adviser
