MLC’s Insurance Income Protection Platinum Super beat out last year’s winner, BT Financial Group, and OnePath.
National Australia Bank’s general manager for business development management, Melissa Heyhoe, said their win was thanks to making their product more affordable.
“Our expanded multi-cover discounts when combined with premium payments by rollover are making a real difference to the affordability of income protection insurance,” she said.
“Our commitment to making insurance as accessible and flexible as possible is MLC’s greatest strength.
“We’re also making an investment of at least $300 million to modernise and simplify our super, investments and advice offering — to deliver better products and services for our advisers and our clients.”
Securing the silver medal, BT national manager, life insurance products, Scott Moffitt, said the BT Super Wrap Income Protection enabled customers to access protection unavailable through their superannuation cover.
“There are restrictions of what you can put in super where it restricts features that aren’t available in super which the adviser and consumer want access to,” he said.
“Our product lets you buy in super the base offering and then just pay additional premium to fund additional features outside.
“You’ve got two policies but for the purposes of consumer it’s one product but part funded by super and part funded outside. Package for income protection solution and structure into their need.
“It has complete flexibility and we will continue to maintain in the regulatory environment that exists to ensure we make all those other features available to our consumers.”
Coming in third for the second year, OnePath’s head of life insurance at ANZ Wealth/OnePath, Gerard Kerr said their Income Secure Basic Super was created last year as a result of the MySuper changes.
“It is a quality offer and it’s recognised in pricing and is competitive by creating some core components in the product for disability, health, and that’s leveraging off OneCare because it is part of the OneCare suite. It has provided advisers with security of knowing it is a subset of the OneCare offer,” he said.
“Since it was launched in July 2014 it has gone very well and it has proved to be quite popular and it’s working for the advisers.”
Kerr said some of the success for such a young product was due to the discussions with advisers on what clients would like to see offered.
“They give you light bulb moments. We take them on board and build them into our product,” he said.
