Our pledge is to go beyond the claim
Author:
AIG
Thursday 26 January 2017
At AIG Life, our aim is to support your clients and their families through difficult times, be it death, diagnosis of serious illness, or an accident preventing your client from working. Our highly experienced claims team is on hand to guide your clients through the claims process. And once contacted by the clients or their next of kin, we can do more than just pay the claim.
AIG has always provided discretionary support to families looking to pay funeral bills when they need it and when we have agreed in principle to pay the claim. But it’s not something that claimants were aware we could do which is why we have agreed to sign up to the Protection Distributors Group’s Funeral Pledge to publicly share what we do.
This initiative follows lobbying by the Protection Distributors Group to sign up to its Funeral Pledge and advance at least £5,000 to life insurance claimants to cover the cost of funerals while claims paperwork, such as probate, is completed.
We have decided to go one step further for our claimants and will now advance up to £10,000 of the sum assured towards the costs of a funeral if we have agreed in principle to pay the life insurance claim. We can pay this direct to a funeral company should the claimants wish us to do so. The payment could help to prevent families from falling into debt while the paperwork behind the payment of a death claim is being gathered and finalised.
Agreeing to the Funeral Pledge - offering to pay a sum early if claimants need it - is the right thing to do whatever their financial circumstances.
What often prevents us from being able to pay a life insurance claim immediately and in full is the paperwork we still need to see to complete the process, usually because probate is still to be approved and the insurance was not held in trust.
Offering to pay some of the money in advance towards a funeral, or straight to a funeral director if the claimants prefer, is the first step in our drive to support our customers as much as we can when they’re dealing with loss and to hopefully alleviate some of the worry for the family and loved ones during this difficult time.
However, our funeral pledge is just the start of how we believe we should help customers when they need us most. AIG believes the role of life insurers is to go beyond the claim if we are to become our clients’ most valued insurer.
Over the coming weeks we will share with you how we believe we can help your clients when they need us most and show them that protection insurance can offer more than the claim.