049: R&D Tax Relief and how can help your brokerage - with Justine Dignam

Is your brokerage fully maximising the support you can give your clients and any changes they have had to make to their process during COVID? Have you had to innovate your business in any way? What relief could you and your clients be eligible for? On today's episode, we’re excited to be chatting to Director of Incentives and Reliefs at Markel, Justine Dignam. Justine is responsible for driving the development, growth and management of the tax incentives and relief division of Markel Tax. She joins us to discuss who, why, how, when and what is R&D Tax Relief and how it applies to the insurance industry.   LEARNING OBJECTIVES: There are tangible ways in which insurance brokers and clients of insurance brokers should be looking at their tax position. R&D Tax Relief is provided by the UK government and is one of the UK’s most generous tax reliefs. There are 6 million businesses classified as UK SMEs and only 60,000 claim enough for R&D Tax Relief – this means a lot of businesses are not aware of this. If you’ve recently pivoted your business and you’ve had to develop processes, planning and testing into your development, it’s worth having a conversation about R&D Tax Relief.   BEST MOMENTS: ‘’The analogy that I always work with is a little bit like if you've got heart condition and you went to your GP and said, I really feel that I've got a problem with my heart, you certainly wouldn't expect your GP to say ok, hop on the bed, and I'll take a look - you would expect that they would refer you to a cardiologist to give you specialist advice. That's how we work with our referral partners throughout the UK.’’   ‘’Going back to that uncertainty, that's really very important because around that uncertainty is where the R&D kind of development work is incurred.’’   ‘’If somebody has had a significant spend on a project where they've had to overcome some technical uncertainties or made advances in processes, then that's definitely worthy of a conversation. We can ascertain whether somebody's got a valid R&D claim within a 10-15 minute telephone conversation.’’   RESOURCES: Justine Dignam’s profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justine-dignam-17423b16/ Justine’s email address: [email protected]   ABOUT THE GUEST Justine joined Markel in 2014 and has been responsible for leading the strategy and development of introducing tax incentives and reliefs to accountancy partners. Previously she has worked within the professional service and accountancy sector in senior positions and at partner level for many years. She has an Msc in Marketing Management, holds the CIM DipM qualification, is a Chartered Marketer and a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing.   ABOUT THE HOST Sarah Myerscough is the Sales and Marketing Director of Boston Tullis Group. The founder of The Insurance Brokers Podcast, she brings a wealth of marketing experience and a fresh perspective on marketing in the insurance sector. Boston Tullis works with insurance brokers to offer solutions to business development ceilings, particularly in the rapidly developing fields of video marketing and thought leadership. If you would like Sarah to help you develop an integrated marketing strategy, using state of the art concepts, then please book a free 20 min call via Calendly    Website: https://bostontullis.co.uk/ Evaluation Link: https://s.bostontullis.co.uk/s/podcastevaluation