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In a earlier instalment of Cowl Word we noticed how group insurance policies may be at discontinuance threat and how one can guarantee your protection is steady.
The group insurance policies in query have been these supplied by industrial organisations akin to banks for his or her financial savings checking account/ bank card clients, or by establishments akin to social golf equipment for his or her members.
Allow us to now have a look at one other ‘menace’ to the continuity of your protection; change of possession, or mergers / acquisitions of insurers.
After the liberalisation course of within the insurance coverage sector in India began across the flip of the century, we now have seen corporations altering arms and being merged.
The underside line right here is that you simply, as a buyer, have safety written into the regulation. In case your insurance coverage firm has a brand new proprietor tomorrow, or is merged into one other entity, it is going to be after due diligence and course of set out underneath the legislation.
Honouring contract
This ensures that the authorized contract between you and your insurer will likely be honoured until its finish. That is the present coverage interval/12 months or the cost of the final advantages/ claims (like incapacity advantages as an illustration) underneath common insurance coverage insurance policies. Underneath life insurance policies, the coverage interval will stretch into the longer term till maturity of the coverage or the dying of the insured particular person. Only a phrase of warning: group life insurance policies are annual in nature. In case of annuity, it is going to be until the cost of the final annuity / return of buy value as per the phrases of the contract. All this factors to a long-term view by the acquirer.
The brand new firm that owns your insurer has to honour all of the obligations underneath the contract and you may set up your rights with them.
Your duty is to proceed to take care of your insurance policies as legitimate by being on time together with your premiums and so forth.
In relation to renewal, policyholders have the appropriate to lifelong renewal of medical insurance and that is binding in your new insurer too. Premium charge will increase and underwriting selections on extra or enhanced protection rests with the brand new insurer.
What are you able to do in an atmosphere when merger information of enormous insurance coverage corporations is within the air?
Keep up a correspondence together with your middleman.
Construct and strengthen your relationship with the contact particular person, his boss the event officer/ company supervisor / staff chief as they could be designated. Go to the department supervisor or equal and make an acquaintance. Discover out the reporting workplace of that department, get accustomed to their communication / grievance course of.
Change of tackle, queries about renewal or any change in premium charge and so forth needs to be put in writing and it’s best to carry on file each your queries and responses, be they in onerous copy or digital.
Many a time, the issue we face is that the agent has retired or is in any other case unresponsive. If, as described above, we preserve a relationship, we are going to study these developments actually early and might proceed the enterprise relationship with out lacking a beat.
However the best way it really works in on a regular basis life is that we realise solely after we don’t get a renewal reminder or telephone name and renewal is due. Or, worse nonetheless, overdue. The worst, after all, is after we attempt to name a couple of declare and are available head to head with nothingness! Belief me it has occurred to me too.
(The author is a enterprise journalist specialising in insurance coverage & company historical past)
Supply- thehindu