Advisers should make clients feel confident enough to disclose medical conditions, Aviva head of claims strategy and governance, Jackie Kerwood, has said.
Speaking at 'The business of protection – preparing advisers to excel' which formed part of income protection week, Kerwood pointed out the difficulties faced by protection advisers when clients are not comprehensive in their disclosure.
“One of the areas that can be difficult is when customers don’t disclose outstanding tests and investigations and they almost underwrite themselves, deciding what information is relevant,” she explained.
“Question sets across our industry are crafted to get the right disclosure so, if someone is experiencing symptoms, even if they think it will come to nothing, they should tell us about those symptoms.”
However, she acknowledged that some customers may find it difficult to disclose their entire medical history due to being “scared” of advisers and how their history may affect their cover.
Kerwood pointed out this is not the case, saying that a lot of disclosure is seen in mental health cover but the reality is a lot of customers with mental health conditions can still get cover.
“They don’t need to be scared about telling us about that, we’re not expecting a clear bill of health from everybody,” she said.
Kerwood therefore suggested that advisers can give “confidence” to customers to better facilitate disclosure by reassuring them that it’s not unusual to have to answer one of those medical questions in a positive way.
A similar sentiment was shared by Cirencester Friendly claims manager, Robert Higgins who also identified the difficulty that can occur from a lack of disclosure.
“The frustration is that there’s a lot of information that is only partly disclosed and we don’t get the full picture,” he said.
Therefore, Higgins suggested that when advisers are taking out contracts with their clients they should “go the extra mile” to understand the person.
“It’s making sure they are answering the questions as thoroughly as possible to make sure that, when we’re providing that contract, when it comes to claiming, we are not having to deliver bad news,” he added.
tom.dunstan@ft.com
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