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Back..  Insurance Provider Aviva revamps its critical illness cover

 

UK Insurance giant Aviva has announced sweeping changes to its critical illness cover in a move aimed at making their policies more attractive to consumers. 

It has increased the maximum sum assured from £500,000 to £2 million and raised the maximum term assured from 25 to 40 years.  It will now also offer cover to persons aged up to 75 years old and has doubled the level of child cover to £20,000.

The changes are seen as a move towards increasing consumer confidence in its critical illness product by reducing complexity and making the cover more comprehensive. 

As part of the improvements Aviva has increased the number of conditions covered to include liver failure, bacterial meningitis, aplastic aenemia , encephalitis, cardiomyopathy and progressive supranuclaer palsy.  It has also tightened definitions of some the existing critical illnesses they cover and have removed unnecessary exclusions that may have prevented claims being paid out previously.

Aviva paid out on 744 critical illness claims in the first six months of the year, which totaled almost £60m at an average payment of just over £80,000.

Critical illness has become an increasingly unpopular form of insurance cover in recent years with many consumers lacking faith in the product.  Yet there are signs of improvement; in the past year a record proportion of claims have been paid out by insurers whilst complaints to the Financial Ombudsman Service regarding critical illness have halved. 

At a time when 1 in 5 men and 1 in 6 women suffer a critical illness before their usual retirement age, it is undoubtedly important to make it more the product more attractive to consumers. Aviva’s changes have been greeted cautiously by industry insiders but the general consensus seems to be that any move towards increasing the number of conditions covered and making policies more flexible for consumers can only be seen as a positive step.