A broad range of enhancements have been made to Sovereign products. Here is a quick review:
- An optional TPD added to Trauma (Comprehensive Living Assurance and Progressive Care). Perhaps, with the addition from Sovereign, this could be said to be the new industry standard – to include a TPD option in comprehensive Trauma. I discussed it with a group of advisers on Tuesday and they felt that it was valuable provided you are buying enough TPD. Those quoting Trauma at $50,000, probably need to buy TPD separately in order to buy enough.
- Total Disability Income claims are now paid in advance although Sovereign are still leery of paying partial disability claims in advance, something we can understand because the hours and amounts are often not known until after the fact. In that situation they now offer a Partial Disability Bridging Benefit in order to provide a claim payment during the transition from Total Disability to Partial Disability.
- Early injury payment. This is a form of specified injury payment although it is not based on a specific schedule and requires total disability. It is likely to be beneficial to insurer, adviser, and clients alike enabling many smaller claims to be cleared without follow-up assessments.
- Increase in the time during which the waiting period can be waived due to recurrent disability.
- The cap on CPI indexation of 10% has been removed. Although we haven’t got near that limit recently I am sure plenty of advisers will recall times when inflation was higher.
- Vocational Retraining Benefit is now included in Mortgage Protection insurance.
- Future Insurability: the time period to exercise the option has been extended.
- Private Health now includes an optional Waiver of Premium on disability.
A significant collection of enhancements. All these features will be in the Quality Product Database going live on Quotemonster today.