10 reasons to use Ellipse for group life and disability cover

1.      Our online quote system offers more options than any other group risk provider: group life quotes for up to 500 members, group critical illness and income protection for up to 300, and a minimum of just two members.  If you’ve not used it before, this 4-minute video explains the main features.

2.      We don’t charge minimum premiums or policy fees.  This makes us particularly attractive to small companies.

3.      Accurate premiums as we don’t use unit rates.  Our group contracts all charge for each member’s cover separately –– so your clients pay the accurate premiums for the cover that their members enjoy.

4.      We use a secure, intelligent online system to collect medical and other personal information about members whose benefits require underwriting.  It typically takes members around 20 minutes for members to complete the assessment (which they can do securely at any computer with internet access) and, in most cases, they get their decision immediately afterwards.  This 3-minute video explains how it works.

5.      We have an automated data updating service that allows clients to upload their data securely, quickly and easily.  Scheme accounts, with details of any changes to direct premium collections are then produced for them to download immediately.  It takes minutes – not weeks or months – to complete the whole process.  This 5-minute video takes you through the whole process.

6.      Master Trust: for registered group life schemes, our Master Trust facility means clients don’t need to set up their own trust and register it with HMRC (and it’s free!)

7.      Top-rated online systems:  clients can register on to our online platform as well, allowing easy and secure access to many features including scheme documents – in the F&TRC e-excellence survey our online systems came out top of all the insurers assessed.

8.      Flex and voluntary schemes available for all sizes of scheme.  Our quotation system brings flex basis group risk cover to small companies.  More information available here  

9.      Event limits in group life: we routinely provide £300 million cover per location in EC and E14 postcodes.

10.  Excellent financial strength ratings: we are part of Munich Re, one of the world’s largest insurance and reinsurance groups.

6 reasons why Ellipse is your best option for group life and critical illness in flex and voluntary

1.      Flex, flex voluntary and pure voluntary variants of group life and GCI available for schemes of all sizes

2.      Online service for you to access a binding flex quote for your SME clients (up to 500 group life), 300 for GCI, giving you control of the process.  (Larger cases very welcome, too: send requests to sales@ellipse.co.uk

3.      No minimum premiums or flat policy fees brings this within reach of clients of all sizes

4.      You set the level of your commission or fees to make this trade economic for you   

5.      Using our advanced secure web servicing for in force business and the market leading individual underwriting process means you don’t get tied down in administration and can move on to the next earning opportunity

6.      Platform to platform data transfer – if you have the latest version of Staffcare running you are Livewire™ ready     

Peter Fenner
Communication Manager

Improving certainty of cover in group life schemes

Imagine this: you have switched cover for a small group life scheme.  Not long afterwards a member who has been in the scheme for years dies and a claim is submitted.  The claim, though, is rejected by the insurance company, quite legitimately.  It sounds like a nightmare scenario, but it can come about because of the way ‘actively at work’ conditions operate.

One of the most attractive aspects of group schemes is that a lot of cover can be obtained in return for little information about the people to be covered, thanks to the operation of automatic acceptance, also known as ‘free cover’ – limits.  Any benefits that fall within the limit (usually, the vast majority) are provided without asking anything about the members; only benefits above the limit are subject to health and other information.  The reason why cover can be given out on such a liberal basis is that insurers expect groups to consist of an average mix of people in various states of health, but it leaves them open to the risk of providing cover to some individuals who are actually in much poorer health.  It is to filter out at least some such individuals that group risk insurers apply ‘actively at work’ conditions.  These withhold cover for members off sick on the day cover is due to start; if and when they return to work, cover is provided.

Actively at work (AAW) conditions can be worded in various ways, varying in stringency, which can be applied according to the situation and it is at the insurer’s discretion to decide what wording to use in each set of circumstances.  Whichever wording is used, though, if a member falls seriously ill or suffers a life-threatening accident the day before cover starts, their absence from work the next day means they are not covered, even if they had been with a previous insurer up until then (and so would have been covered had the cover not switched from one insurer to another at that point in time).  Nobody could have known beforehand that the lack of cover would arise, so the issue is not about anyone failing to do their job – it is inherent in the way actively at work conditions operate.

This is not just a problem we have been led to consider in the abstract.  Situations where parties have been left without cover can and do arise, and advisers with long experience of group risk business have flagged the problem.  As well our product development being heavily based on adviser feedback, here at Ellipse we also believe in designing out risk from products and processes wherever we can. 

We have come up with an alternative to actively at work conditions that we believe will be easy for clients to understand and work with.  We now ask clients to tell us of employees who, in the past year, have been off sick for four or more whole weeks if the policy covers up to 500 members, or thirteen or more whole weeks where there are 501 or more members.  (In both cases, the whole weeks of absence need not be consecutive – we want to know about people who have had four separate weeks off sick as much as those who took off one continuous block of time.)  The key is that we are asking for information about what has

already happened rather than imposing a condition around what might happen.  Employers should have the information on file as any absence of more than 7 days requires a note from the employee’s doctor to be provided to them by the employee.

Although this approach requires slightly more information from the client before cover begins, the danger of catastrophic gaps in cover – which fall on the parties least able to carry them – is removed.  From a contract certainty point of view this approach is far superior and provides clients and their advisers with a much clearer and more detailed understanding of what is being insured.

Tom Bond, Underwriting Specialist

Opening up flex and voluntary cover to SMEs

One of the key trends in the employee benefits market is the growth of flexible and voluntary benefit schemes.  Where once only large companies could afford to set up the infrastructure necessary to run such schemes, software – middleware is the jargon – is fast becoming available in forms affordable for companies of all sizes.  We are supporting this movement  – after all there needs to be a product to serve this – by offering life and CI flex/voluntary products to schemes of all sizes. 

For advisers who have invested in the middleware to operate these schemes, our online quotes now provides flex and voluntary variants of our group life and group critical illness  products. If your middleware can handle the basics of running flex schemes, we would be delighted to switch on the flex quotes facility, giving you instant online quotes for flex and voluntary group life schemes with up to 500 members or group critical illness ones for up to 300 members.

We have also completed the automated process that allows our group risk administration to send/receive data to/from benefit platforms.  Our latest live links are to the Staffcare software  used by many advisers and JargonFreeBenefits.  This gives a real productivity dividend for all, particularly your clients 

·         Data updates driven automatically from your client’s payroll system

·         All accounts reconciled in the current month

·         Client pays for the cover – by DD – at the time they have it

·         No messy annual reconciliations

·         Totally secure data transfer

·         No backdating of medical underwriting decisions

·         Process efficiencies, ensures sustainably competitive premiums in the long term

Both these initiatives reflect our intention of becoming the group risk insurer of choice for flex and voluntary schemes.

 

Ed Bryan

Head of Distribution

Acting on Feedback from Advisers

Every six months or so, we invite advisers who have registered with us to provide their feedback on various aspects of our products and services.  This helps us ensure that we are delivering a good service and providing tools that meet advisers’ needs, as well as help to steer our future system developments.

We have received some very useful feedback from advisers about our processes around setting up a policy.  Essentially, the request was for more explanation and direction around how a scheme is established. 

There were some things we did that could have been a bit clearer, so we’ve acted on the feedback and as a result, we have tidied up some of the items – emails and PDF documents – that our automated systems generate.  We have also added some extra pages to our website explaining our processes, which include a link to a downloadable document with flowcharts showing each step in the process.  The new web pages explain how to get cover started and when and how to submit inception data.

We hope you will find these useful and that the small tweaks we have made make placing business with us that little bit smoother.

As always, we would be glad to hear of any parts of our business that could be improved, especially if you have ideas about how! The new process flowchart has come about in direct response to a comment in our last survey of advisers.

Bad habits in group risk and how to break them

We humans are creatures of habit and routine.  It makes us feel secure.  And we have been known to cling to habits and routines even when those patterns are really bad for us.

In 2008 we created a plan to create a new group life and disability insurer that purposefully looked at very process in our value chain and say why do it like that?  Is there a better, simpler, quicker, more economic way.

One of the sacred orthodoxies was that clients won’t provide frequent data updates and will be hugely resistant to any change to the annual “simplified” administration method.   Our research showed however that the insurers supplying this part of the employee benefits structure were the least well rated and liked by the corporate clients.   “Messy, late accounts and costs that leach into subsequent budget years” sums up what the customers’ finance people  said.

So our approach is based on two assumptions

1.      If you ask the person close to the data at a point in time when the data is current they will give you complete current data  

2.      Clients will like to pay for the actual cover they have in the period that they have it and to be able to budget for the costs  

The big pension led intermediaries who pass data through pensions administrations units seem to love making this horribly complicated and the very biggest corporate clients tend to ask for longer to pay their bills – if they have a “Treasury” function that is a sign that like to hold onto cash -  but pretty much everybody else knows what to do when you ask them to provide a quarterly update of their people insured under the scheme.

Doing a job once a year means you have to relearn it. A quarterly prompting e mail with embedded links to a secure website that arrives when you have the last month’s data to hand because you have been working on it for other purposes just works.  It has become one of those comforting habits that makes life easier.                   

The British 10km | Fundraising for Winston's Wish

Little did we know when we signed up for the British 10km during our long cold winter what a scorcher the day would turn out to be! We were both more than a little nervous to run in the 30 degree heat that has enveloped the country in the last couple of weeks. Our preparation had been good; with plenty of mileage under our belts, but nothing could prepare us for this!

The start line was staggered and we passed the London buses marking the start line about 15 minutes after the race had officially began (I made a mental note of this for the finish line so that I wouldn’t be disappointed when I turned the last corner of the course to see the finish clock!). Music lined the course and we started at a fairly steady pace. My confidence grew as we passed a number of people who looked far fitter and better prepared than either of us.

Shortly after the 2km marker I heard a member of the crowd tell her friend that she saw someone running in a Winston’s Wish vest. She sounded surprised; and this spurred me on further – it is nice to hear the murmurings in the crowd as you run past. Lots of people shouted ‘Go on Winston’ at us as we ran, keeping us motivated around the course.

The official crowd of Winston’s Wish well-wishers (a bit of a tongue-twister there!) waited for us on Embankment and shouted & cheered as we passed by. I can’t begin to explain what a boost it gives to you as a runner to have people cheering specifically for you when running in a crowd of thousands of people. The course looped around through the City and back along the Embankment at which point we passed the Winston’s crowd again and received a second big cheer.

The final few kilometres of the race went by in a bit of a blur – the heat was getting to us and I longed to see the end of the course. Our final time was a respectable 52 mins and 30 seconds – not a personal best by any means, but something we can be proud of amongst the throngs of people and blistering heat.

Thank you to all of you who sponsored us in our race. It was a fantastic event to be part of, and such a good cause to be raising money for. Our sponsorship link is still up at http://www.justgiving.com/samantha-alan  if you have not yet sponsored us but would like to; we would both very much appreciate it.

John Ritchie and Steve Bee interview

We're big fans of what Steve Bee is doing with his 'Jargon-Free Benefits' concept - a plug-in-and-play solution that allows any adviser to take on the established benefit consultancies handling group pensions.  Our systems are designed to link seamlessly into such set-ups, and Steve and our own CEO, John Ritchie, were interviewed by Editor of Cover magazine, Paul Robertson, about smart ways to handle group business in the new auto-enrolled, RDR environment.

Here's a link to the video of the interview: 

http://www.covermagazine.co.uk/cover/news/2231791/video-an-audience-withellipse

Keep calm and carry on

I suspect most of you are fed up with the electronic trade news feeds, feeding us a diet of gloom and doom on the start of RDR. The high water mark was the “Standard Life predicts IFA extinction within the year” story which was simply a miscommunication between an internal PR and a keen trade journo.

It seems to me that advisers and adviser businesses have always been adaptable, resilient and agile enough to adapt to environment changes. The establishment in our sector ~ the largest insurance companies, the banks, the “regulator classes” - have had a decade long antipathy to smaller adviser firms. But here is the reason why predictions of adviser extinction are just plain wrong.

Advisers like customers. 

They like to talk to them, persuade them to get organised and do the right thing for themselves and their families and in that they are the subset of our sector that are truly different. The historical perspective that the adviser layer of the value chain was the source of mis-selling is just wrong. The heart of the problem were the product structures provided by financial service providers and the front end loading to pay distributors. The latter was created because providers did not want to absorb marketing and distribution risk. The product defects usually came from the providers’ compulsion to shift as many different types of risk to customers. Every product mis-selling scandal had its roots in the product design.

The imminent demise of advisers has been predicted many times before, but they have proved their ability to adapt, even if each shift in the environment sees some falling by the wayside. Clients still have risks that need mitigating and enough of them value the expertise advisers provide, so I’m sure that the prophets of doom will once again be confounded.

Group protection payouts - no time for delays

There is no doubt that classic UK group life provided by employers as an employee benefit is a marvellously efficient way of getting meaningful levels of cover to families.  The cost is fully tax deductible for the employer and using a registered discretionary trust the payment at claim does not have to go through the deceased’s estate where there could be significant delays.

So why am I concerned that in a significant proportion of claims that the money is not getting to beneficiaries quickly enough?  The reason is often that the sponsoring employer is not ready to receive the money.  The two main causes are that, although the trust is established, a trustee bank account has not been set up or there are no current trustees to exercise the discretion. 

Another cause of delay can be caused by nomination of beneficiary records not being maintained.  If a trustee knows where the member wants the money to go to naturally the process is quicker. 

What is Ellipse doing about it? Firstly we have established a Mastertrust and lots of our micro, small and SME group life schemes use that facility (http://www.ellipse.co.uk/master-trust).   We are also building some more online functionality to help sponsoring employers to be well organised in this area.    

As advisers, sponsoring employers and insurers we really should be really tuned in to getting benefits paid promptly.  Most families have very little margin for catastrophes with real earnings flat and petrol, rail fares, utilities and food costs steadily rising. So it is up to us to make sure we are all organised to make sure the group life benefit works optimally.    

(This Blog first appeared in Cover magazine)