AIA Australia has recommended the establishment of an Independent Claims Assistance Service to aid consumers when making a claim while also reducing the involvement of third parties, including lawyers, at time of claim.<\/p>\n
The life insurer made the recommendation as part of its submission to the Parliamentary Joint Committee Inquiry into the life insurance industry and stated the service should be industry funded and deal with inquiries about claims processes, lodging claims, and claims decisions.<\/p>\n
AIA Australia said the service would not be restricted to any claimants but would be useful for consumers insured through direct channels \u201c\u2026as they do not have the advocacy services provided by superannuation trustees, or financial advisers, to assist them in the same manner as the other channels\u201d.<\/p>\n
The submission stated that legal representation during a claim needed to come at an appropriate time but the current trend of engaging representation while lodging a claim was \u201c\u2026unnecessarily eroding payments in a growing number of cases.\u201d<\/p>\n
AIA Australia stated the growing involvement of legal representation at time of lodging a claim was unnecessary given that recent ASIC reviews have found that 90% of life insurance claims are accepted and paid, most without any form of representation.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe want to do more to help individuals during the claims process to ensure they can have the full support of their entire benefit payment, rather than needlessly sharing a significant proportion of it on legal representation.\u201d AIA Australia stated in the submission.<\/p>\n
The life insurer has also voiced its support for ASIC\u2019s call for a public reporting model for life insurance claims data and claims outcomes and suggested the establishment of a centralised Insurance Claims Register.<\/p>\n
Under this approach all claims for a life insurer would be lodged in a central register and data around handling times, outcomes and disputes could be extracted.<\/p>\n
AIA Australia also stated the register would be useful in setting standard definitions and industry service parameters and could also be used to access claims histories during underwriting and claims processing to identify cases of purposeful non-disclosure or fraud.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
AIA Australia has recommended the establishment of an Independent Claims Assistance Service to aid consumers when making a claim while also reducing the involvement of third parties, including lawyers, at time of claim.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8294,4,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35688","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-claims","category-products","category-services"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35688","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=35688"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35688\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35688"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35688"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/riskinfo.com.au\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35688"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}