Kenneth Hayne’s royal commission has revealed that insurance will be the topic for its sixth round of hearings, which will run from Monday, 10 September to Friday, 21 September.
The hearings will be divided into three broad topics: life insurance (with case studies on AMP, ClearView, CommInsure, Freedom Insurance, REST and TAL), general insurance (looking at Suncorp’s AAI, Allianz, IAG and Youi) and the regulatory regime (hearing evidence from the Code Governance Committee, the Financial Services Council and the Insurance Council of Australia).
The royal commission said the sixth round of hearings would consider issues associated with “the sale and design of life insurance and general insurance products, the handling of claims under life insurance and general insurance policies, and the administration of life insurance by superannuation trustees”.
“The hearings will also consider the appropriateness of the current regulatory regime for the insurance industry,” said the commission.
“The commission presently intends to deal with these issues for the purposes of the public hearings by reference to the case studies … These include the natural disaster case studies that were originally to have been examined in the fourth round of public hearings.”
The commission will also hear evidence given “by consumers of their particular experiences”.
Applications for leave to appear at the hearings in respect of the case studies must be received by the royal commission by 5pm on Friday, 31 August 2018.
Well, there goes the opportunity to grill TAL & Aus Super over the implementation of Aus Supers new insurance (at the time), that was to the detriment of their 2 million members. Their TPD definition changes were pretty bad. Were the trustees of Aus Super acting in their members best interest, or maximising their commissions from TAL?
TAL will be appearing, on what, we don’t yet know.
Personally can’t wait, those superannuation hearings a few weeks ago were great, hoping the insurance hearing will be even better and I’m sure they will be.
Like to see the FSC explain their lies over the LIF, cartel increasing of existing customers premiums whilst cutting premiums for new business and their farcical Life insurance “code of conduct” which has no benefit to customers or penalties for breaches by members.
Its is a disgrace that they offer Level Premiums but then continually increase the premiums for their in force Level premiums whilst dropping premiums for new policies. We need a TRUE True Level structure which doesnt allow the insurer to raise premiums for any reason other than in line with inflation.
Pretty soon there will be no Insurance advisers left anyway, especially if they totally remove commissions when Labour win the election
Exactly. It should be illegal to refer to Level premium without a guarantee the age related premium calculation will be implemented at the commencement of the policy and only subject to indexation related increases in relation to the insured benefit or the policy fee.
For an adviser to demonstrate the differences between a Stepped or Level premium structure they must have the confidence that the client is making the right decision based on a long term benefit.
ASIC have continually banged on about advisers offering Level premiums to clients in order to reduce escalating premium costs, but do not even understand the insurers can decide to increase the rates for existing policyholders at any time.
What does that do to the advice process from the adviser’s perspective ?
Secondly, if the Acutaries cannot accurately calculate the long term risk/premium balance correctly for the life of the policy and determine an appropriate guaranteed Level premium, then don’t call it Level premium.
Terms like ” True Level ” are totally misleading as these can also be changed if the insurer decides to lift all the rates at once.