nib New Zealand launches Ultimate Life & Living product range

nib New Zealand has launched Ultimate Life & Living, a suite of six new insurance products available exclusively through advisers.

The six new products are:

• Ultimate Life Insurance

• Ultimate Trauma Insurance

• Ultimate Income Protection Insurance (available in both Indemnity and Agreed Value)

• Ultimate Mortgage Protection Insurance

• Ultimate Total & Permanent Disability Insurance

• Ultimate Waiver of Premium

nib is introducing a simplified application process. The updated system, nibAPPLY, will allow advisers to quote and submit applications for health, life and living insurance products simultaneously, improving efficiencies.

Advisers must complete product training and accreditation to offer the new products. nib offers online modules for both new and experienced advisers.

For a limited time, new customers get a $300 credit on their nib Ultimate Life & Living Insurance policy after paying for their first month or more when processed through nibAPPLY before 30 June 2025.

For a limited time, existing nib health clients can get 10% off their Health Insurance premiums when they bundle Health with Ultimate Life & Living Insurance, when any member on an eligible health policy is issued with a new Ultimate Life & Living Insurance policy (subject to meeting minimum premium criteria). The discount applies to the total health policy premium excluding the policy fee and the offer is available exclusively through nibAPPLY until 30 September 2025.

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Product and pricing changes at Partners Life

Partners Life have announced a range of product changes, effective from 15 March 2025, aimed at giving customers more flexibility and the option to remove features if they don’t want to pay for them.

• The built-in Total and Permanent Disability (TPD) Benefit will become a TPD Option. If a client opts out of TPD, the premium for their monthly disability cover will reduce accordingly. This change applies to Mortgage Repayment Cover, Household Expenses Covers and Income Cover Agreed Value, Agreed Loss of Earnings and Indemnity Loss of Earnings.

• They have made changes to Trauma Cover and Moderate Trauma Cover for clients who have suffered an out of hospital cardiac arrest. They have removed obsolete medical requirements, and added current diagnostic tools used by medical staff to confirm a cardiac arrest has occurred. The wording has been updated to allow for new and future diagnostic tools.

• They have updated Trauma, Moderate Trauma and Severe Trauma Cover wordings to let clients know that Partners Life will notify them when they can exercise their Life Cover or Deferred Trauma Cover buy-back options.

Any beneficial enhancements to policy wordings are automatically applied to existing in-force policies under the Guaranteed Upgrade of Future Benefits feature.

In addition to the product changes, Partners Life have reviewed premiums, in light of increased volume and cost of medical claims. Premiums for Private Medical Cover including Specialists and Tests Option will increase by 18% and the policy fee will increase from $58.08 to $64.13 per annum, both from 22nd April 2025.

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What’s the biggest health claim paid for a procedure?

The health insurance industry has been experiencing a time of rising medical costs, where both volume of claims and inflation have been increasing. We’ve taken a closer look at individual claims values that a few insurers have released recently. As you can see from the data below, the costs of individual claims can be astronomical.

nib regularly publish their top 5 health claims by month. RiskinfoNZ has an article collating historical nib’s top health claims by month here.

nib’s top health claims for January 2025

Treatment                     Cost              Gender              Age

Spinal surgery               $101,000         Male                   16

Cardiac surgery           $85,000           Male                   46

Cardiac surgery           $56,000           Male                   70

Cardiac surgery           $54,000           Female               70

Digestive surgery          $53,000          Male                   72

nib’s top health claims for December 2024

Treatment                      Cost                Gender               Age

Cardiac surgery            $103,000          Male                   72

Cancer surgery             $102,000          Male                   77

Cardiac surgery            $93,000            Male                   80

Cardiac surgery            $88,000            Male                   76

Spinal surgery                $87,000            Male                   48

But these do not top the charts of what we are currently aware. Southern Cross’s most expensive surgical claims were $256,165 for a spinal fusion procedure and $127,191 for a breast reconstruction.

While Partners Life don’t release a similar monthly overview of their top claims, their ‘The story behind our claims’ slideshow highlights their largest single payouts since 2011. The most expensive claims paid out were a whopping $1.6 million+ for Total and Permanent Disability or Income cover; $2.9million +for Life cover; $3.2million + for Trauma cover and $982,000+ for Private Medical Cover.

While the majority of claims won’t cost anywhere near as much, what used to be ample caps of some older medical values don’t seem so rosy in light of recent inflation and surging claims costs. Yet we haven’t seen any insurers coming out and indexing claims caps. We think that’s wrong, and we’ll offer a score boost to the first insurer who offers indexed caps.

What types of claims have you heard of and how did they go? We would love to hear more from you, especially if you are a Quotemonster subscriber, through our adviser claims experience tool (check the side menu when you are next logged in).

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nib release launch date for Ultimate Life & Living

nib Ultimate Life & Living will launch on 28 March 2025. Details of the suite of products were released at nib’s nationwide adviser events last month, and advisers can complete their training and accreditation on the nib Learning Management System using their existing password.

Products available will include:

• Ultimate Life Insurance – cover to support a client’s loved ones if they die or are expected to die within the next 24 months;

• Ultimate Trauma Insurance – cover that extends beyond the initial diagnosis of a medical condition to support a client and their family’s well-being;            

• Ultimate Income and Mortgage Protection Insurance – pays a monthly amount if a client is unable to work because of illness or injury;

• Ultimate Total & Permanent Disability Insurance – focuses on the financial impact of lasting disability, so clients can rebuild their future with less financial strain;

• Ultimate Waiver of Premium – removes the burden of premium payments for a client if they’re disabled, ensuring their Ultimate Life & Living cover remains active.

 The full suite of products will be available for comparison on Quotemonster by the end of the month. You can find out about how Ultimate Life and Living works on Quotemonster at our forthcoming roadshows.

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nib to roll out life insurance offering next month

nib’s new Ultimate Life and Living products, which include life, trauma, TPD, income protection and mortgage protection will be available from next month. nib are currently running roadshows outlining its new products, but pricing will not be released until closer to the policies being in the market. QPR has rated the products, and they have come out favourably.

New customers buying bundled health insurance and Ultimate Life and Living policies will qualify for a 10% premium discount, while current members can qualify for multi-cover discounts ranging from 10% – 15%.

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Partners Life to release Quote for Alteration Phase 2

Partners Life new upgrade to their Quote for Alteration (QFA) digital tool is coming soon. There’s a handy tutorial here. The upgrade will provide a fully digital process, where advisers can apply for increases and alterations for existing clients in the same way they do for new clients within QFA. QFA applications will be available on Partners Protection Plan and Business Protection Plan policies; Funeral Plan, Essential, Heritage and Loancare policies cannot be serviced online through QFA.

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Government announces reforms to strengthen NZ’s capital markets

The Government has announced a package of reforms to help ensure New Zealand’s capital markets are working to support a productive economy. The Government is making it easier for businesses to raise money from the public by making it voluntary to provide forward-looking financial information as part of an Initial Public Offering of shares. These changes are expected to be in place by May 2025.

The Government has also opened consultation on two proposals: enabling KiwiSaver investment in private assets; and potential adjustments to the climate-related disclosures regime. Consultation closes 14 February 2025.

The Financial Services Council (FSC) has expressed strong support for enabling KiwiSaver funds to invest in unlisted assets. FSC CEO Kirk Hope said,

“By enabling KiwiSaver investments in unlisted assets, such as infrastructure projects and innovative New Zealand businesses, we can unlock substantial capital for domestic growth.”

“This reform will not only provide Kiwi businesses with much-needed capital to innovate and expand but the opportunity of greater diversification for KiwiSaver.”

Some financial advisers warn that regulators need to get on board with the proposals, however. At a recent event we held in conjunction with the Financial Services Council, advisers asked questions about whether the Financial Markets Authority would be supportive of fund managers choosing to invest more in private assets and infrastructure projects which tend to be illiquid in nature. We think that these are good questions, and the answers will be highly sensitive to the context in each fund: for example, the scale of the investments relative to the total fund size and the liquidity of other assets, and the ages, balances, and probable withdrawal patterns of investing members.

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Asteron Life paid out 97% of claims

Asteron Life paid out 97% of the Trauma, Life and Income Protection claims it received in the year ended June 30 2024. In total, Asteron Life paid out $112 million of claims, with $53.5 million being paid out for Life Insurance, $34.1 million in Trauma policy payments and $24.4 million in Monthly Income Protection cover claims.

Accident or Injury was the leading cause of claims, for both Monthly Income cover and Trauma cover. Mental Health claims duration remains high, with an average duration of 8 - 12 months, compared to other new claims where the average duration was around 6 - 8 months. Executive Manager Claims and Customer Solutions, Seema Bangera, said

“Return to work outcomes are directly related to early intervention and rehabilitation. This means the mental wellbeing of customers needs to be at the forefront for claims specialists and we need to ensure all clients have the necessary support building their personal resilience for their return-to-work journeys.”

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Quality Product Research – Major Review: the updated research rating for Cardiac Arrest

Introduction

We were challenged by an insurer regarding our rating for Cardiac Arrest. Given the significant advances in modern medicine, it was an opportune time to conduct a major review of this item and evaluate how the definition of cardiac arrest has evolved in the market. Our conclusion is that claim criteria for this benefit have improved over the years, which can lead to better outcomes for customers.

Please find our proposed changes below.

Renaming Cardiac Arrest to Out of Hospital Cardiac Arrest.

Review Process

We began by notifying insurers and reinsurers of our intention to review this item. This included inviting them to share claims data and clarify how their definitions are applied to real claims, with appropriate references to their policy documents. We also shared a proposed rating with advisers during our research deep dive session earlier this year.

After gathering the necessary information, we updated our product database accordingly. The final rating was released in QPR v16.2 and is now live on Quotemonster.

Please note that while this document includes the proposed rating for comprehensive trauma cover, the updated rating has been applied across moderate, severe, and business covers.

Your feedback

We highly value your feedback on how these wordings are being applied to claims you may have encountered. Please email us at info@quotemonster.co.nz with details of any recent claims to help us refine our understanding, or alternatively please use the Adviser Claims Experience on Quotemonster to log your claims experience, a video on this feature can be found here.

The FSC has released its latest Money & You research

The Financial Services Council (FSC) has released their latest research report, Money & You: Managing Risk Through Challenging Times, which explores the attitudes of New Zealanders towards risk management. Some of the key findings are below.

• Only 41% of respondents had life insurance, 39% had health/medical insurance, 23% had trauma/critical illness insurance, 18% had total and permanent disability insurance.

• For the 12 months to 30 September 2024, FSC industry data showed 1,521,740 health insurance policies and 4,145,287 life insurance products (one person may have more than one policy e.g. life insurance, income protection insurance and total and permanent disability insurance policies).

• The majority (66%) who have life and health insurance consider it value for money.

• The biggest drivers of taking out life and health insurance policies are peace of mind and worry about financial consequences.

• The most common reason given for not having life and health insurance was that insurance is too expensive (74%), followed by being healthy and not seeing the need for it (14%), and not trusting insurance companies (13%).

• Cost of living meaning people can no longer afford insurance was the top reason given for no longer having insurance across life, trauma or critical illness, income protection, total and permanent disability and health/medical.

• For those without insurance, 64% would consider taking out an insurance policy if they had more money, 25% would take out an insurance policy if their health started declining and 18% would take out an insurance policy if they started a family. There is a gap in understanding of how insurance works, with only 3% of those who would consider taking out an insurance policy if their health started declining knew that they might not be able to get cover for certain health issues or they might face higher premiums because of them.

• The majority of health (61%) and life (77%) insurance policies are paid by individuals, with the remainder being partially or fully subsidised by employers.

• When it comes to health/medical insurance or life insurance being provided by employers, 54% really want this and a further 35% might possibly want this.

• 45% of respondents have a poor understanding of the relationship between risk and return.

2,002 online survey responses were collected during March 2024 and were representative of the NZ consumer population in terms of age, gender and income.

It is worth noting that as a low engagement product, life and health insurance is something that respondents find hard to recall accurately. That leads to interesting results - this survey contains a probable over-estimate of the number of people who own health insurance, and a probable under-estimate of the number of people who hold life insurance. But the recalled level of cover is, in itself, interesting. For example, if you think you do not have life, trauma, or income insurance, but in fact you do, you or your estate may fail to claim when you may be eligible to do so.

Readers interested in contrasting these survey results with data on the eligible population should contact us.

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