Weekly Protection Update – 20th May 2022 – Protection Claims Season

Hi everyone, I hope you’ve had a good week.

Protection Claims Season has started and several life offices have published their claims.

Do you ever use any of this content?

I know some of it can be a bit dry as its all facts and figures, but collectively, they do give a good report on our industry and the fact that claims do take place.

Let me take you through a few highlights I’ve been reading this week:

The Exeter

The Exeter are; as you know an Income Protection specialist who also happen do have a really good life cover product for your more difficult to insure clients.

Looking at their claims report they paid out 93% of claims in 2021.

The average age of the claimant was 37 years of age and you might remember me talking about the longest IP claim last week.  With the Exeter, they have one which has been going for 25 years.

If we look at the detail of the reasons why people claimed, it’s quite interesting:

Musculoskeletal was the biggest reason for claims at 38.4%, but Covid was the second reason why people claimed on their income protection policy at 20.9% of all claims.

And if you look at the deferred periods for claims last year; 47.5% of them were day 1 claims.  In fact, 96.1% of all Exeter IP claims were for deferred periods of 4 weeks or less.

And looking at the report, I really like the fact that the Exeter have published how many consultations were booked through their health and wellbeing app which every customer has access to.

It was 455 in total last year and these were spread between remote GP consultations, lifestyle and nutritional consultations, physiotherapy sessions and mental health support.

That’s a really nice reminder from the Exeter about those added value services and it will be interesting to see which other life offices report that type of information.

I’ve added a link to the report in this weeks protection update.

Legal and General

Big life company who pay lots of claims.

This week they have published their numbers and they’ve produced a claims magazine which focuses on claims statistics by each product.

So for example if you look at those situations where thy have paid terminal illness benefit; you can see exactly what type of terminal conditions the clients had when they made their claim.

Looking at Critical Illness Cover you won’t be surprised if I told you that 78.7% of female claims were for cancer. But for males, it was just over half at 51.5% where the reason for the critical illness claim was cancer.  Males were suffering a significant amount of heart related conditions at 24.3% compared to just 3.3% with females.

They have a breakdown of children’s claims and then income protection claims where the average length of a claim with L&G was 2 years.

Interestingly, they break own the claims paid into age groups so you can see how long they had their policy before they made a claim.

The 20 to 29-year-old group were making lots of protection claims and they didn’t have their policies in force very long before they needed to do so.

And L&G continue to break down the claim statistics by different age groups in their report so it’s interesting that you’ll be able to be more focused if you want to share this information with your clients.

One last thing I just wanted to pull out of the L&G claims magazine was they’ve included a specific focused piece on the reasons why some claims haven’t been paid.  What L&G are showing there are 5 key areas to focus on getting right first time to avoid the situation where the life office has to decline a claim:

• Alcohol
• Smoking
• Weight
• Pre-Existing conditions
• And any current symptoms the client is experiencing at the time of the application – even if these haven’t been diagnosed.

We’re going to get more of these over the next few weeks and I think there is an opportunity in there to remind ourselves that protection policies do pay out and at very high levels each and every year.

L&G paid £797 million last year.

Now I’ve added a link to the L&G Claims magazine to this protection update along with those video claim stories.

Aviva Claims

And next week Aviva will be releasing their claims report.  You’ll remember last year Aviva reported that they paid out over £1 billion in claims.

On Monday, Jacqueline Kerwood who is the claim philosophy manager at Aviva will run a session talking about the detail of the report and it should give you an extra insight about exactly how to interpret the report along with what they are seeing in terms of the extra support customers receive when they’ve made a claim.

Aviva will be running 2x webinar on Monday 23^rd May.  They are CPD’able and I’ve added a link to this week’s protection update.

Roadshows next month

Next month, we will be back on the road at 6 locations around the UK with our Protection & GI exclusive roadshows (the Mortgage Roadshows take place in July).

They are called Reasons to Recommend: what you need to know – and these aim to be informative and interactive sessions with a specific focus on protection.

Normally, we would run a mixed agenda but this time there is a real focus on protection.

And on these roadshows, HSBC Life will be headlining each of them and as they are brand new to our protection panel; you’ll get to find out lots more detail about their proposition and as the title suggests; reasons to recommend them.

These take place in about 1 month from now, but we need you to register.

There will be quizzes, recognition and Bob and myself will see you at each of them.

Now just one more thing…

The London event will take place at Canary Wharf.  HSBC have kindly offered us their presentation suite which is a really magnificent facility, but there are extra bits of security for everyone who attends.

So, the first thing is – you have to register.  If you don’t, they simply won’t let you in the building.  Please don’t just turn up on the day if you’ve not registered.

We’ve got 50 places at that roadshow, so secure your place now.

I’ve added the link to register for all these roadshows on this week’s protection update.

So that’s it from me once again.

Have a great weekend all and I’ll see you soon!