| Insurer | Funeral Payment Pledge | Claims Charter |
| Aegon | ✔ | ✔ |
| AIG | ✔ | ✔ |
| Aviva | ✔ | X |
| British Friendly | ✔ | ✔ |
| Canada Life | X | X |
| Cirencester | N/A | X |
| Guardian | ✔ | ✔ |
| Holloway | N/A | ✔ |
| HSBC | ✔ | ✔ |
| iptiQ | ✔ | X |
| L&G | ✔ | ✔ |
| LV= | ✔ | ✔ |
| MetLife | N/A | ✔ |
| ReAssure | ✔ | X |
| Royal London | ✔ | ✔ |
| Scottish Widows | ✔ | ✔ |
| Shepherds Friendly | N/A | ✔ |
| The Exeter | ✔ | ✔ |
| Vitality Life | ✔ | ✔ |
| Zurich | ✔ | ✔ |
Campaigns
Purpose of the PDG Claims Charter
The PDG is keen to ensure claimants have the best support; a caring, efficient and hassle free experience with claims paid as quickly as possible. We’ve put together this Claims Charter to outline what we feel should be standard best practice based on our experiences helping our clients with their claims.
We are not looking to attribute ratings or scores to insurers as found elsewhere – it’s simply a case of whether firms meet the Claims Charter requirements and if so, we’ll be delighted to give your firm our stamp of approval and promote this to the market.
There are many fantastic approaches provided by insurers at claim stage to help claimants and we considered adding much more into the charter to reflect some of the outstanding work being done. We felt it was unrealistic though to expect every insurer to offer the best of everything available across the market, and we wanted to ensure our requirements were achievable. This Charter therefore simply aims to secure a minimum level of support to claimants by all insurers whilst expecting most firms to also go above and beyond.
We will routinely review the Charter though in our continued efforts to nudge our industry forwards for the benefit of consumers.
PDG Claims Charter
- Dedicated Claims Team available, with a phone based claims process for claimants to submit and manage their claim throughout, supported by digital documentation to assess claim efficiently. Paperwork only used where there are no digital alternatives possible or where claimant requests.
- No potential claimant can be turned away by anyone not on the Claims Team.
- Claimants to have named point of contact, with regular updates to claimants at least every two weeks, unless otherwise agreed, to keep them informed of progress. Queries from claimants during the claims process to be responded to by end of next working day.
- Intermediaries are notified of all claims when made, to include the product being claimed on, without the customer being asked to opt in. Opt out options should be avoided whenever possible, but if the customer explicitly asks for their intermediary not be informed then their wish must be adhered to.
This will ensure records can be updated and no potential distress caused to clients and families through the intermediary not knowing about a claim. - Pro-actively offers the PDG Funeral Payment Pledge and/or advances payments to speed up life cover claims where there is no trust in place, or where other factors could delay payment being made.
- Once a claim is approved, money is to be paid to the claimant within 72 hours (ignoring external factors out of insurer control such as probate), excluding income protection claims which should be paid at the earliest available payment date.
PDG Funeral Payment Pledge
Paying a claim is the moment of truth for insurance companies. Of course we know that many claims are paid quickly, but some are still held up by probate leaving families waiting months or even years for the money.
To ensure that families can pay the funeral costs, we have asked insurers to offer to advance some funds directly to the funeral director where no other arrangements have been made. An advance of this nature could make a real difference.
Some insurers already did this but on a case by case basis, but we ask as part of the pledge that this is done pro actively on each delayed claim.
The three things we ask insurers to pledge are:
- To advance a minimum of £5,000 to a funeral director when they otherwise can’t pay the claim due to probate delays, etc.
- To pro-actively offer this in every case where there is a delay.
- To pay the funeral director after you’ve fully assessed and accepted the claim to ensure that there was no non disclosure.