{"id":2017,"date":"2009-07-07T22:08:20","date_gmt":"2009-07-07T12:08:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/?p=2017"},"modified":"2025-09-02T11:34:59","modified_gmt":"2025-09-02T01:34:59","slug":"latest-poll-the-value-of-more-claims-information","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/2009\/07\/07\/latest-poll-the-value-of-more-claims-information\/","title":{"rendered":"Latest Poll – The Value of More Claims Information"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Vote<\/a><\/p>\n

The release of the risk store’s 2008 industry claims statistics<\/a>\u00a0forms the basis of our latest riskinfo poll.<\/p>\n

We want to know whether your client engagement would be enhanced if you were able to access more\u00a0information from the life companies that highlights the nature and extent of claims paid to Australians.<\/p>\n

There is an\u00a0almost universal lament within the\u00a0insurance community that the Australian public believes the life insurance industry simply does not pay claims, or at least does not pay enough.\u00a0 It is an excuse used often when clients and prospective clients deal with financial advisers and an attitude that also discourages many advisers.<\/p>\n

… the challenge for advisers and the industry is to\u00a0have that positive\u00a0 message understood and absorbed by the consumer<\/h6>\n

The opposite is the case, as\u00a0demonstrated by the risk store’s 2008 claims statistics, and IFSA’s latest industry claims report (see riskinfo article IFSA Releases Results of Claims Experience Investigation<\/a>).\u00a0 But the challenge for advisers and the industry is to\u00a0have that positive\u00a0 message understood and absorbed by the consumer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Traditionally, life companies have been reluctant to release information about their claims experience.\u00a0 The reasons are serious and practical –\u00a0the more detail an insurer releases about its claims history, the better chance there is of its\u00a0competitors and others determining its underlying profitability when combining claims data with statutory (public) reporting required by APRA.\u00a0 In other words, the\u00a0information is ‘market sensitive’.<\/p>\n

But in recent years, the tide had begun to turn.\u00a0 It’s turning slowly, but it’s turning, with a number of insurers releasing more and more detail about the make-up of their claims book, such as the breakdown of trauma events,\u00a0the overall dollar value and proportion of claims per event and category, as well as average claims paid per insurance category (ie\u00a0Death, TPD, Trauma,\u00a0Income Protection).<\/p>\n

In the United Kingdom, life companies are\u00a0more ‘generous’ than their Australian counterparts in terms of the amount of detail they release for\u00a0public consumption.\u00a0 This has been due, in part, to the adverse and biased\u00a0electronic media campaigns in the early\u00a0part of this decade\u00a0\u00a0that targeted the life companies as un-caring institutions who found any excuse to decline a valid claim.<\/p>\n

Ironically,\u00a0the open-ness of the information that is now availabe in the UK has been partly responsible for the enhanced reputation of the life insurance industry\u00a0in that country.<\/p>\n

But on a day to day level, would access to more information about claims statistics be of value to you in your dealings with your clients?\u00a0 Or do you believe that more access to claims information from the life companies will make little to no difference to the way you conduct and manage your client relationships?<\/p>\n

There are many more points of view and cases that can be made, both for and against this question, and we encourage you to have your say in our Comments forum at the end of this article.<\/p>\n

So, have your say and make your voice heard.<\/p>\n

\"Vote<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The release of the risk store’s 2008 industry claims statistics\u00a0forms the basis of our latest riskinfo poll. We want to know whether your client engagement would be enhanced if you were able to access more\u00a0information from the life companies that highlights the nature and extent of claims paid to Australians.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8294,49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2017","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-claims","category-polls"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2017","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2017"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2017\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2017"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2017"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2017"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}