Every adviser knows the conversation. A client rings years after their last review, something has gone wrong, and you find their cover hasn't moved since the kids were small and the mortgage was half what it is now. The policy did exactly what it said it would. It just stopped matching their life somewhere along the way, and nobody was watching the gap open up.
That gap is rarely a knowledge problem. You know what a new baby, a bigger mortgage or a business stake does to someone's need for cover. It's a timing problem: the life event happens quietly, the client doesn't think to call, and by the time it surfaces in a review it's months or years late. Cover-gap detection, now live for everyone on Core + AI, puts a watcher on that gap so you find out before the client does.
The gaps that open between reviews
Under-insurance is almost never a single bad decision. It's drift. The cover you arranged was right for the client in front of you that day, then their life kept moving while the policy sat still. The dangerous gaps are the ones that don't announce themselves — no renewal notice, no premium change, just a household that has quietly outgrown its protection.
A handful of these come up again and again across an NZ book:
- A new mortgage or top-up that pushes debt well past the life and trauma cover arranged years ago.
- A baby or a new dependant, where income protection and life suddenly need to carry more people.
- A shift from PAYE to self-employment or a company stake, changing both the income-protection picture and who depends on it.
- A partner dropping to one income, leaving the household's cover sized for a salary that's no longer there.
- Cover that simply hasn't been looked at in years, sitting flat against rising house prices and incomes.
None of these is hard to spot once you're looking. The trouble is that across a few hundred clients, nobody can look at all of them all the time. So the gaps stay invisible until a claim, a complaint, or an awkward phone call makes them visible.
What the watcher actually does
Cover-gap detection sits across the data you already keep — sums insured, premiums, household and dependant links, renewal dates, and what gets captured in your review notes and meeting summaries. When something shifts that suggests a client's needs have moved past their cover, it surfaces the client, the likely gap, and its reasoning in plain language you can read in a few seconds.
So instead of a client buried on page nine of a spreadsheet, you get a short, ranked list: this household took on a bigger mortgage and their life cover hasn't changed; this client mentioned a new baby in their last review and their income protection looks light; this policy hasn't been reviewed in years and the numbers no longer add up. It's the kind of read-through a sharp paraplanner might do on a quiet afternoon — except it runs across your whole book, every day, without one.
A flag is a prompt, not a verdict
This is the important part, and we'll be plain about it. A flag is a prompt to look — not a recommendation, and certainly not advice. The tool can see that a client's circumstances appear to have changed while their cover hasn't. It can't know their full picture, their budget, their other arrangements, or what they actually want. That judgement is yours, and it stays yours.
In practice, every flag is the start of a conversation you'd want to have anyway. You open the client, see the reasoning, and decide: genuine gap worth a review, already handled elsewhere, or not relevant. Dismiss it, diarise it, or turn it into a task and a follow-up email in your own tone. The watcher does the noticing so you can spend your time on the deciding — the bit only you can do.
Turning a flag into a tidy review
A flag on its own is just a to-do. The point is what happens next, and this is where it slots into the way you already work. From a flagged client you can move straight into a review without re-keying anything — the gap, the reasoning and the relevant policies are there to talk through.
There's a quiet record-keeping dividend, too. When you act on a flag, the prompt, your decision and any client contact land in the advice trail alongside everything else. If you reviewed a client because their circumstances changed and concluded their cover was still appropriate, that's a record captured as you work, rather than reconstructed under pressure later. Treat it as a tool that supports good record-keeping, not a guarantee of anything — and confirm your own obligations with your licensee or compliance adviser.
Where it shows up and how to start
Cover-gap detection is part of AdviserDesk AI and is on now for everyone on Core + AI — nothing to install, no settings to wrestle with. If your book is already in AdviserDesk, it's quietly reading the data you keep, and flags will start surfacing against the clients who need a closer look. If you're on Core and want it, switching on AI applies from your next billing cycle and the watcher starts working straight away.
The honest pitch is modest: this won't replace your judgement, and it won't catch everything a good conversation would. What it will do is stop the slow, silent gaps hiding behind a few hundred other clients. You still make the call — you just get to make it on time, while it's still a phone call and not a claim. That's the difference between a client who feels looked after and one who quietly wonders why nobody noticed.