We’ve listened to your feedback on how the implementation of changes to our fracture cover have been handled. In response, we’ve reviewed how these will come into effect – the purpose of this communication is to clarify the situation.

Background:

The intention of our fracture cover is to provide customers with a lump sum payment to help them manage the impact a debilitating injury can have on their short term day to day life. We offer comprehensive cover that offers generous payments for a large range of conditions.

Medical technology is constantly changing and this includes how minor fractures can be identified. When developing the proposition we didn’t anticipate receiving claims for these types of injuries and they had not been included in our pricing structure. It is for this reason that we have introduced exclusions for avulsion/chips and micro fractures. Currently, claims for these conditions represent a very small minority of our overall claims, approximately 1%. However, there is the potential that these could increase over time hence the need for us to introduce the exclusions now.

We firmly believe that our fracture cover continues to provide excellent additional benefits to assist with the financial impact these injuries present. Furthermore we believe we can offer cover to more people as our fracture cover is available across our life insurance, critical illness and income protection products. These changes should not alter an adviser’s ability to recommend our Fracture Cover benefit with confidence.

Implementation of this change:

We will now implement the change from the 1^st January 2018; therefore all policies that include fracture cover submitted between 18^th Sept and 31^st Dec 2017 will not have the revised exclusions applied. We will be contacting all affected customers, prioritising policies that are on risk first, and will contact customers in the pipeline at a later date once their policies are on risk.