Chatswood serves the life and health insurance sector in New Zealand with market intelligence, data, and bespoke consulting services. Some of these are provided in conjunction with Quality Product Research Limited - a subsidiary that brings you Quotemonster.
We believe that good decisions are more likely to occur when we have good information about the market environment in which we operate. Intuitive leaps and creative decisions are always required, of course, but the more they are based on a firm foundation of observation, the better they tend to be.
Asteron Life updates personal and business insurance products
Asteron Life has unveiled a raft of updates to their personal and business insurance products.
Asteron Life has unveiled a raft of updates to their personal and business insurance products.
The changes include clarification of existing policy terms to ensure greater transparency and ease of understanding and a range of new and enhanced benefits.
The new benefits and enhancements include:
Repatriation benefit on personal and business life cover
Advancement benefit for terminal conditions on personal life cover
Shortened waiting periods for income protection and mortgage and living cover
Cover conversion benefit on business disability cover and farmers disability cover
Enhancements to the Funeral benefits on life cover, kids cover and business expenses
Enhancements to two definitions for trauma recovery and 11 definitions for major trauma
The requirement for 14 days total disability as part of the waiting period has been removed from business disability cover, farmers disability cover and business expenses cover
Introduction of a premium and cover suspension to the optional needlestick benefit
Removal of some restrictions from various benefits such as specific injury support – lump sum and monthly, trauma reinstatement option and the crisis benefit within the optional immediate assist package
Claire Sutton, Executive Manager Life Portfolio and New Business at Asteron Life said
“It's key that our range of covers continue to add value for our customers, policies and terms are easy to understand, and insurance remains as affordable and accessible as possible. We know that these things really matter for our customers and advisers. We also worked hard to ensure that these improvements have not increased customer premiums, given we know how tough it is for many New Zealanders right now.”
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Partners Life premium reductions and announcement of upcoming product changes to improve flexibility
Partners Life has made a series of changes to their products resulting in premium reductions or otherwise lower prices for customers:
increased their high sum insured discount, which results in a cheaper premium
decreased the new annual policy fee from $132 to $100 for the Partners Protection Plan
adjusted premium rates for larger sums assured across life, life income, terminal illness and accidental death cover
reduced accelerated trauma on their yearly renewable premium by 10% after allowing for cross-subsidisation between life cover and accelerated trauma
Chief and appointed actuary Kate Dron said
“Given the cost-of-living crisis that’s going on at the moment, we looked at were there any opportunities for us to do anything to actually help our customers out.
….that’s looking at the way that we do things and the way that we run our business and making sure that we’re doing it as efficiently as possible. And where we’re able to do that, we’re seeing that it’s fair for us to allow the customer to share in some of those cost savings, which is why we’ve implemented these changes.”
Partners Life have announced some upcoming changes to make their products more flexible.
Ability to opt out of specific injury option and critical illness option on their disability income
Ability to opt out of total permanent disability on trauma
Important website upgrades: Quotemonster v4.4.0
Our IT team have made some monstrously good upgrades to Quotemonster recently. To get all the good stuff and make sure the site is running at its fastest, please refresh your page and scroll down to ensure that you’re on our latest version – web V4.4.0.
Our latest updates include:
A beta (testing) function called Upload Insurance Quote is now available to all Advicemonster users. Once you’ve saved a PDF version of your insurer quote, drag this into the portal and be amazed when an overview of your information is shown and automatically input in your Quotemonster Client and Benefit Details. Note this is only a beta version, it uses AI to read the uploaded quote, and we require users to review the information that is generated. For more details about our policy on AI use please refer to our terms and conditions or contact us.
Another update available to Advicemonster users is the option to include more reports in your SOA appendices. Simply select the reports you are interested in including and links will be presented in Appendix Four: Quotemonster Research Report.
Chubb Life’s 10% lifetime discount is available for quoting. This discount is applied to new business clients with healthy BMI measurements of between 18.5 and 24.9, are non-smokers, and have no medical loadings or exclusions. To apply the lifetime discount to your quotes, simply select the company in the Result panel and tick the “Apply 10% Lifetime Reward?” option.
Please note, if you’re interested in accessing a BMI calculator, we have one available in the Underwriting tab.
Specific Injury (SI) pricing and quoting is now available! This benefit has been highly requested over the past few years, so we are very excited about this addition. We received a large amount of feedback from advisers, insurers, industry experts and our research advisory board. The four companies you can compare are AIA, Asteron Life, Chubb Life and Partners Life.
AIA, Asteron Life, and Chubb Life require a qualifying cover to be selected with SI, while Partners Life has a standalone benefit, all products have minimum and maximum cover levels. Here are the relevant rules re-qualifying covers when quoting this benefit on Quotemonster:
The consensus from all the feedback we received was to have Partners Life Specific Injury product (Specific Conditions) excluded from the standard comparison by default but include a tick box which selects and ‘turns on’ the rating for Specific Conditions. Therefore, to include this provider in your premium or research comparison, ensure you have selected Include Partners Life Specific Conditions.
We believe that this approach is fair because it gives those Advisers who wish to provide a complete overview of on-sale Specific Injury products, the option to do so.
If you have any questions or improvements you’d like to bring to our attention, please feel free to email us on info@quotemonster.co.nz
