FNB Life is extending credit life insurance benefits to cover a portion of cashflow relief instalments for customers who already have credit life insurance. Under normal circumstances, customers pay an additional amount to extend insurance cover, however, the provider is extending this benefit to protect qualifying customers against the financial impact of COVID-19.
The FNB Cashflow Relief Plan covers a number of instalments that a customer has with the Bank, through a separate credit agreement. The extended credit life insurance benefit will cover the portion of the Cashflow Relief Plan that has been used for the customer’s credit instalments where there is an underlying credit insurance product on those instalments.
In addition, customers with policies taken out before the implementation of the NCA Credit Life Regulation, which are restricted to retrenchment cover, will now be able to claim where they have not been retrenched but are unable to earn an income for various reasons. Customers who had invalid claims for this reason, during the COVID period from 16 March, may be eligible to claim and FNB Life will proactively assess and pay these claims.
“The benefit extension will significantly increase the number of customers who can claim from their policy and ease the financial burden during these difficult times. In instances where our customers have not been retrenched but are unable to earn an income over this period and meet the criteria of the new benefit, we will honour these claims,” Lee Bromfield, Chief Executive of FNB Life says.
“We are doing this so that if a customer claims on their credit insurance for the underlying credit product, we should also cover the extension of the loan created through the emergency loan. We want to ensure that all customers are fully covered for all qualifying credit repayments when they have an FNB credit insurance policy.”
The impact of COVID-19 has been devastating to many households, therefore extending these benefits at no additional cost will alleviate some of the pressure among customers who already have cover but suffered full loss of income.
“Our teams have put in significant efforts around increasing our claims processing capacity to handle the large uptick and we remain committed to helping our customers navigate their way through this difficult time,” says Bromfield.
“We’ve also worked tirelessly in improving the digital claims process, with many claims’ automation initiatives put in place in the past few months to enable easy claims processing, including the introduction of an online claims submission process and tracking function via FNB.mobi and the FNB App.”
