How I help insurance and financial firms

Insurance and financial services are difficult to write about well. The products are technical, the wording is watched by a regulator, and the reader is often nervous, in a hurry, or both. It is easy to end up with copy that is either too vague to mean anything or too dense to read.

I have written extensively for both sides of this sector – insurance and risk on one hand, financial planning and advice on the other. That has meant everything from commercial and personal cover to pensions and financial planning. I help firms explain cover and products clearly and accurately, so clients understand what they are buying or being advised to do, and so search engines and AI assistants have something specific to work from.

What makes insurance and financial content hard to write

Insurance and financial products are not easy to write about. A policy has excesses, exclusions, limits, conditions and optional extras, and all of them matter to the person deciding whether the cover is right. Leave them out and the page is useless. Put them all in badly and nobody reads to the end.

The wording also has to keep the regulator happy, which is where a lot of financial copy goes wrong. In trying to avoid saying anything that could be challenged, firms end up saying almost nothing at all. The page becomes a wall of careful, generic assurance that could describe any provider.

And the reader varies enormously. A business owner comparing brokers, a finance director weighing employee benefits and an individual trying to understand a policy each need a different level of detail. Good copy has to serve them without confusing any of them.

Where it usually goes wrong

Most established firms in this sector do not lack content. They have a lot of it, but much hasn’t made its way onto the website.

Product pages are often thin, written to push the reader towards a quote rather than to explain the cover. Compliance-driven caution flattens the writing until one provider reads much like the next. Guides and articles pile up as rules and products change, until several cover the same ground and none is clearly current.

There is a newer cost to this too. A firm can rank perfectly well in Google and still not get named when someone asks an AI assistant to recommend an insurer, broker or adviser. Usually that is because the site never states plainly what it covers and who for, so an assistant has nothing specific and quotable to use. I have written about why that happens and what to do about it.

What I can help with

The work depends on what the firm needs, and you can pick from any of it. Some firms come for one job – a product page, a series of articles, an edit. Others want the whole picture looked at first. Both are fine.

If you want to know what your existing content is doing before you spend more, a content audit is a good place to start. I go through the product pages, service pages and guides — much of it accurate once, some of it out of date now — and work out what to keep, improve, merge, remove or create. On larger websites I use Manticore, software I built for my own audits, to check every page that is in scope and document the evidence behind each decision.

If you know what you need, I can start there:

• Website copy that explains cover, products and advice clearly: product and service pages, sector pages and about pages that build confidence without drowning the reader in caveats.

• Regular articles that answer the questions clients actually ask, keep pace with regulation and product changes, and support the lines of business the firm wants to grow.

My complete offer, including campaign work and English editing, is on the services page.

I write to be checked. Regulated copy should pass through your compliance people, and my job is to make the cover and the expertise clear on the page so they have less to fix, not more.

Alan Boswell Group: an ongoing content relationship

I have written for Alan Boswell Group since 2022, producing and updating search-led articles across more than forty subjects spanning insurance, risk management, employee benefits and financial planning.

It is the kind of work this sector needs: technical enough to be accurate, clear enough to be useful, and kept current as products and rules change. The brief is not to make insurance sound simple. It is to explain it well enough that the right reader trusts the firm and knows what to do next.

“Ben is a pleasure to work with, and I value his critical insight and recommendations to improve our content.”

Hannah Tweedie ACIM, Alan Boswell Group

A few things insurance and financial firms ask

Can you write copy that keeps our compliance team happy?

Yes. My job is to explain cover and advice clearly and accurately, so the compliance review is about sign-off rather than rescue.

Do you understand insurance and financial products?

I have written about cover, risk, employee benefits and financial planning across the sector for years, so I can ask the right questions and get the detail right, and I check what I’m unsure of. I’m not your compliance or technical expert – I take what I know and what your people know and make it clear and quotable on the page.

Can you keep our content up to date as products and rules change?

Yes. Financial content dates fast as products change and the regulator moves. Revising pages to keep them accurate is part of the ongoing work, so no reader is acting on cover or advice that has since changed.

Talk to me about your content

If your website needs to make cover or advice clearer, or you want to know why an assistant recommends other firms, tell me where it’s falling short. A rough outline is plenty.