Partners Life has made changes to its Agreed Value disability products, effective 25 June 2018, it revealed in a newsletter update.
The changes affect the following products: Income Cover Agreed Value, Agreed Value Taxable, Agreed Loss of Earnings, Mortgage Repayment Cover and Household Expenses Cover.
The change results from lessons learned during the development of FastApp, which the insurer launched in early 2017 and aims to provide advisers additional flexibility and allow them to speed up the underlying application process.
One of its features includes removing the need for financial evidence and justification at application time for Agreed Value benefits.
“This got us thinking, and we’ve subsequently decided to offer the option to issue Agreed Value benefits without upfront financial justification to our standard application and underwriting processing,” said Partners Life General Manager Marketing and Product, Kris Ballantyne, in a video included with the update.
The video demonstrated how advisers can now select ‘no’ under a new drop-down option named ‘financials’, for the afore-mentioned cover types, within Partners Life Quote software.
If this option is selected, the insurer can issue the policy without financial evidence.
Ballantyne said this is possible due to a new piece of policy wording called Justification of the Sum Insured.
“The Justification of the Sum Insured policy wording we have developed gives you and your client the ability to justify their sum insured based on the most favourable financial evidence they can provide for the period starting 24 months prior to the policy commencement all the way up to the date of claim,” he added.
He said this gives clients the best chance of justifying their agreed value sum insured while “avoiding the complexities and delays of attempting to get financial evidence at application time”.
Once evidence that justifies the sum insured has been received the Justification of Sum Insured policy wording will no longer apply to that benefit.