FNB Life has proactively paid out its biggest unclaimed benefit to date, valued at R6 million, for a life insurance policy.
The claim was triggered by the FNB Life’s routine policyholder check, followed by the tracing of the beneficiary.
Through the Department of Home Affairs, FNB Life routinely checks via the National Population Registry to ascertain whether any of its policyholders have died.
The pre-emptive claims process pays-out an average of R 8.2 million to beneficiaries per month with over R174 million in pre-emptive paid to date.
Raj Makanjee, chief executive of FNB Retail and Private Banking says: “As a financial services provider with a focus on money management, we believe that insurance is vital in protecting families against financial hardship. Furthermore, our industry-leading proactive payout also demonstrates our efforts to always put our customers’ needs at the centre of our solutions.”
Lee Bromfield, chief executive of FNB Life, says: “This specific policy was only active for five months, and our team worked diligently on tracing the beneficiary to inform them about the policy and helped them to compile the necessary claims documentation for the pay-out to be processed. Often, the beneficiaries of these policies aren’t aware of the benefit, so through our pre-emptive claims system, we are able to initiate the claim on their behalf. Over the years, this has saved families against financial hardship after losing their loved ones who may be bread-winners.”
While this process has eased the claims process for beneficiaries, tracking beneficiaries comes with its own challenges, one being the inability to trace policy beneficiaries due to incorrect or insufficient beneficiary information. In most cases, the insurer has had to work off a name or initial and surname with no date of birth, ID number or contact details. Another hindrance is the fact that potential beneficiaries refuse to provide their details when contacted to avoid being scammed.
“It is critical for customers to ensure that they provide the correct beneficiary information and are constantly reviewing their policy details to ensure that they’re all up to date. From our side, we have embedded the capturing of mandatory beneficiary details in the sales process and have introduced a function on cellphone banking and the FNB website that allows policyholders to conveniently update their beneficiary information.
“We also encourage customers through the eBucks programme to have a valid beneficiary on their policy. Policyholders also need to inform all their beneficiaries and family members whenever they take out various covers.”
In addition, customers are advised to regularly review their policy information and ensure that they have updated beneficiaries to help ease the process of finding them,” says Bromfield.
PERSONAL FINANCE