While Australia’s AFCA received more than 70,000 complaints in the year to June 30, it appears complaints regarding life insurance continue to be minimal and those regarding life adviser firms even more negligible.
A statement from the financial complaints authority outlines a preliminary data ‘snapshot’ for the year to June 30, 2021 which shows that under “complaints received by product line” only 2% of these were about life insurance (also see: Life Insurance Only a Small Percentage of Complaints Lodged).
The same snapshot reveals that of these complaints about life insurance the issues were:
- Incorrect premiums: 213
- Denial of claim: 212
- Delay in claim handling:172
- Service quality: 141
- Misleading product/service information: 109
While AFCA’s searchable public data on financial complaints, Datacube, has yet to be updated with the latest six months, in the period from 1 July 2020 to 31 December 2020 under “percentage of complaints progressed per product group” life insurance sat at 2.7 percent.
Searching further it shows in that six month period, 505 life insurance complaints were progressed and 485 of these closed.
The Life Insurance Product Overview, again for the six months to 31 December 2020, shows that in the life insurance category 40.61 percent of the complaints were regarding Income Protection and:
- 26.05 percent were regarding Term Life.
- 11.49 percent were Total and Permanent Disability complaints
- 9.2 percent were Trauma complaints.
The same section includes a table showing each of the financial firms complained about, the type of business, the number of complaints received and closed and how many were found to be in favour of the complainant.
On this table of the 43 financial firms named, nine are financial advisers/planning companies and, of those, only three had outcomes where the complaint was resolved in favour of the complainant.
Click here to link to AFCA’s Datacube.