Partners rings changes

A range of changes to Partners Life policies reflects an increasing focus on "living benefits" in insurance.

Friday, November 30th 2018, 6:00AM

The insurer has rolled out a number of policy improvements.

Among them are new conversion benefits:
• allowing up to $500,000 of a person’s trauma cover to be converted to up to double the sum insured of severe trauma cover without underwriting
• allowing the standalone trauma cover sum insured to be converted up to an equal amount of life cover and trauma cover accelerated without underwriting
• specials events terminal illness cover benefit to allow anyone under 30 who buys a property, gets married or has a baby to convert terminal illness cover to life cover without underwriting.

There are also enhancements to its life cover, trauma and total permanent disability cover, including adding conditions to the “no wait” category on TPD and enhancing the definitions of conditions including Alzheimer’s disease and stroke.

It has also extended the opportunities for trauma cover to be bough back in the event of a partial benefit or diagnosis benefit payment.

There are also changes to private medical cover.

Partners has also introduced a stand-down period of 90 days for its redundancy cover benefit on mortgage repayment and household expenses cover.

It said it had experience and unexpectedly high uptick in claims soon after policy commencement. “Such claims experience is potentially indicative of anti-selection risk, which is exceptionally hard to protect against through underwriting for redundancy risk.”

Russell Hutchinson, of Chatswood Consulting, said each individual change was relatively small.

“But when you consider them as a whole two things strike me: the first is a relentless focus on improvement, the second is the emphasis of the changes on living benefits, which are increasingly important in a market that has been too focused on death benefits.”

Tags: Life insurance Partners Life