Aviva Individual Protection (Critical illness+)
Aviva has spent the past year and a bit (following its acquisition of Friends Life in April 2015), reviewing how best to incorporate the best bits of both organisations’ well-respected protection offerings.
The new products are called Life Insurance+, Life Insurance+ with CIC, Critical Illness+ and Income Protection+. The plans include Aviva’s ‘protection promise’. This provides free life cover during underwriting, up to £500,000. Life change benefit, separation benefit and house purchase cover are also available subject to underwriting, at no extra cost.
Critical illness cover can be included that has options to upgrade the cover, upgrade children’s benefit, add Extra Care Cover and include cover for Total Permanent Disability.
Critical Illness+ is a three tier proposition. The core critical illness cover includes 36 full payment conditions, two additional critical illness conditions, (less advanced cancers of the breast and prostate), and six surgical treatments covered under an accelerated surgery benefit. Children’s benefit is included, which provides cover from 30 days old and includes all 38 conditions applicable to the plan’s adult life, as well as hospital benefit and children’s death benefit.
Customers can upgrade their cover to include a further 13 full payment conditions, 36 additional critical illness conditions, and four surgical treatments provided under an accelerated surgery benefit (which pays on ten surgical treatments). Upgraded children’s cover provides cover from birth and includes a further eight children’s critical illness conditions, 11 conditions covered under child extra care cover, (including a boosted payment of up to £50,000), advanced illness benefit and death benefit from 24 weeks gestation.
Extra Care Cover can be added alongside critical illness cover. This provides an additional £50,000 payment if the customer suffers a critical illness, or an upgraded critical illness or total permanent disability and is left with severe and permanent symptoms.
Plans are designed to use the digital ALPS platform. This includes a simple user-friendly calculation to choose the main plan parameters. Cover includes a benefit guarantee and customers can choose an annual benefit increase to account for salary increases.
Across the new products, Aviva offers a raft of help, information and support mechanisms through what it calls Support Plus. These include:
Second Opinion by Best Doctors.
Bupa Anytime Healthline (nurse-led phone support).
Care and Counselling Services (face-to-face or phone support for all the family).
Two additional benefits are also available:
Global Treatment (second opinion and treatment abroad up to £1m pa per person). This benefit costs £4 a month.
Fracture Cover (cash lump sum on a sliding scale up to £60K). This benefit costs £3 a month.
Comment: Aviva has done a good job in trying to bring together two different approaches in its new protection range. The end result is complex (although not as complex as some) and flexible, offering a choice of how best to put together the right benefits for most clients.
Disappointingly, there is relatively little that is that new or exciting here – although arguably the market leader does not need to do that anyway. Certainly, supporters of Aviva and Friends Life’s old products will see lots that they are familiar with and a few good surprises too.
In a market that remains dominated by price, competitive pricing and the power of the Aviva brand should make sales of these products a relatively easy task for most advisers. Tampering with existing successful products , and especially trying to bring together two different approaches is never easy. The result here largely works and gives Aviva a platform on which to build further in future too.
For the adviser, yes there is a lot to take in but the aviva-for-advisers.co.uk website is a good place to start (and sets out well how each product works), while the ALPS platform enables advisers to explain the cover well to clients and then to process and manage applications
Plus points: The best bits of Aviva and Friends Life in a new package; Good flexibility; Some uprated benefits; Biggest insurance brand in the UK.
Not so plus points: Potential over-complexity; Relies on digital ALPS platform to best manage, which may put some advisers off; Relatively unadventurous.
Website: http://www.aviva.co.uk
Rating (max 10): Innovation: 8. Overall: 8. Gold
Tags: Critical illness; Aviva