Product tweaks take Tower to the top
The recent awards history of Tower’s Life Protection Plan is proof of what can be achieved by constantly fine-tuning a risk insurance plan’s features and definitions.
The plan has placed first in this year’s Term and Total Permanent Disability (TPD) awards category, improving on its third place last year, which followed no less than two relaunches of the plan in the preceding 18 months.
Senior risk product manager Ron Williamson makes no apology for the relaunches, saying they were necessary to “strengthen the plan’s definitions, TPD in particular, based on what the advisers told us their clients were asking for”.
Williamson said Tower is “always looking to improve our products and in fact we are again considering some changes”, although he would not say whether another relaunch is planned.
However, he said the company is “looking at lifestyles and what happens to people as they get older”.
Tower holds regular adviser forums that were instrumental in the release of a number of new product and product enhancements earlier this year.
One of the key changes, and one that consumers would surely consider sufficient on its own for Tower to take out the category award, was to actually reduce TPD premiums, by an average of 7 per cent.
Another key change to the Life Protection Plan this year was the introduction of the Business Insurability Option, which enables clients to increase their life cover if this cover is taken out for business-related reasons. The new option enables clients to increase their life cover without going through all the usual medical and other underwriting requirements, Williamson said.
Another improved plan definition, was the inclusion of a fourth criteria that pays out on 25 per cent whole of person impairment immediately on a diagnosis being made, rather than after a six-month waiting period.
AIG Life too undergoes a major upgrade every year of its Priority Protection plan, based on planner feedback, according to marketing manager Ken Morgan.
He said that last year a raft of new offers were made to the plan, which placed second in the Term and TPD category this year, not least of which is the money-back term, which offers a refund on premiums if a client survives for 10 years.
Other key changes to the plan were the inclusion of cover for children and cover for spouses.
Zurich head of life risk Andrew McKee said a key change to its Term Life Insurance Plus plan in April was to de-link some of its term and TPD lump-sum covers, effectively introducing a stand-alone TPD contract.
“There are no longer any rules in our product preventing a planner, for example, to taking out TPD for a client only up to the level of death cover the client has,” he said.
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