Group life - an essential service

Group life cover for companies is effectively one of their utilities.  Like their gas, electricity and water they need it to work without any interruptions and to be as transparent and inexpensive as possible.  This is what Ellipse delivers. 

Our online services are designed to make setting up and running group life cover simple for both clients and advisers.  Our position as the most technologically advanced provider in the market has been recognised both by advisers and independent reviewers – we were ranked first for online capability in both the ORC annual survey of group risk advisers (Group Protection Track 2014) and F&TRC’s e-excellence report.

Efficient online processes saves the advisers’ time and increases productivity.  By minimising the time they need to spend on low-value administration more time is left to focus on high-value consultancy.  This in turn means that handling group life business becomes much more feasible for advisers of all sizes, not just the large employee benefit consultancies. 

The death of an employee is a catastrophe for that person’s family in both financial and psychological terms.  It is imperative that the money gets to the family quickly.  Making a claim and receiving the benefit should be a simple and smooth process.  To this end, we improved our already efficient claims service by doing away with the need to see an original death certificate in the vast majority of cases, instead verifying deaths via an electronic enquiry to the Register of Deaths. 

Handling claims is not just about smooth processes, though.  We recognise and acknowledge the personal tragedies that sit behind the claims we deal with and show sympathy and compassion in how we handle our communications with the people affected.  To offer practical help alongside the financial benefits we provide, we have an arrangement with Winston’s Wish, the leading childhood bereavement charity in the UK.  We encourage our insured families to contact Winston’s Wish to get practical support and guidance.  For each death claim made on our policies we make a donation to Winston’s Wish.  We also sponsor their program helping families bereaved as a result of suicide - a situation where the charity's expertise and support is often especially appreciated.  (1 in 5 calls to the Winston’s Wish helpline relate to bereavement after a suicide.)

It takes craft and investment in systems and processes to make these delivery processes simple.  We believe that offering a high-tech, low-cost group life proposition is the way to engage new companies and advisers who previously felt excluded by a veneer of complexity that has historically overlaid this corporate utility.

How we can help complex clients budget internally

Many companies will have their own internal cost centres and need to account for spending in each centre, including what goes on benefits.

A consistent request from clients is to have accounts split; internal cost centres have their own budget pressures and they do not want to cross subsidise other budgets in the group.

The issue - Internal cost pressures and premiums that don’t reflect the accurate cost:

A typical scenario could be where different divisions of a company need an accurate cost at the end of a financial year to pay for their share of a centrally purchased benefit.  A good example of this is our own company, Ellipse.

Ellipse is part of the Munich Re group and as such we are part of the benefits package centrally purchased by Munich Re UK.

At the end of the year, we are sent an invoice for our share of certain benefits based on the unit rate of the overarching scheme and our share of the sum assured.

However, we’re a growing company with a young workforce and doing it this way doesn’t accurately reflect the cost of our cover.  We’d much prefer to have a breakdown showing our split.

Here is a typical example of how Ellipse can help:

A client we recently quoted for bought and sold a lot of different subsidiaries.  The client needed to be able to charge the exact cost for each subsidiary to the internal cost centre, which meant knowing how much of the premium was attributable to each member’s cover. Although the client company itself was very large, the firms they bought and sold depended on contracts won or lost, and could just result in three or four people joining or leaving.

Averaging out a unit rate based from a much larger scheme would have been inappropriate and failed completely to reflect the true costs per member.  As we price at a member level and because we use members’ actual joining and leaving dates, the supporting reports we could provide gave the breakdown they needed to support internal cross charging.

How does Ellipse actually provide this accurate cost breakdown?

Every time we issue a statement of account for a scheme we can, where requested, provide an automated breakdown of the member costs. This is provided on a category to category level.  So, when establishing schemes, if the categories are aligned to the cost centres, the cost for each category will show the cost for each cost centre.

Many companies are in a similar position of needing accurate costs for different parts of their business so next time you have a client asking for a breakdown of accurate costs so they can budget internally please remember that Ellipse will be able to help. 

Ed Bryan, Head of Distribution

Let’s all support #PlanIf

Ask yourself, “If you were to die tomorrow, what would life be like for your family?”

Yesterday we attended the launch of ‘Plan If’ a new campaign by the Childhood Bereavement Network which Ellipse are supporting and funding. The launch took the form of a tea party and was held in the atmospheric and appropriate ancient crypt in St. Mary Le Bow church. Writer and columnist Annalisa Barbieri was in charge of the hosting the event.

The Plan If campaign aims to encourage all parents to put in place the practical and personal things that would make a difference to their children and families if they were to die while their children were still young. Things like wills, plans for guardianship, life insurance, family stories and letters for children to read in the future, which would make a difference to their children should one or both parents die.

Alison Penny, Co-ordinator of the Childhood Bereavement, spoke about the startling results of their survey of over 2000 parents of children under 18 which revealed:

·         Only 1 in 4 parents of young children have an update will, yet almost 73% think it’s important to have one

·         Half of parents have no plans in place regarding the guardianship of their children should both parents die before the children grow up

·         1 in 6 parents felt that even the thought of guardianship was ‘too hard to think about’

·         Only 1 in 3 parents that someone in their family would know how to access important financial information if they were to die

·         83% of parents have written a letter for their child(ren) to be read after their death

We then has the opportunity to hear first–hand from Gemma and Richard, both bereaved as children talk about their experiences and what difference they felt a Plan If could make to families.

Gemma spoke about losing her mother when she was 10, how she realised her mum must have had life insurance or pension as that helped them pay off their mortgage. She also said how she wished she had a letter from her mother to read or even some stories written down of what her mum was like when she was a young girl.

Richard shared his story by saying ‘‘My grandmother died when I was 13, my aunt died when I was 14,  the dog died when I was 15, my grandfather died when I was 16, my mum died when I was 17 and my dad when I was 19’. He recalls and is aware that it helped that he was able to inherit somewhere to live which gave him the security he needed when everything else had gone. 

John Ritchie closed the campaign launch by speaking of his own personal experience of being bereaved as a child and highlighting that the first step in a Plan If should be ensuring that you have life insurance sorted to help your family in case of financial difficulties. Money enables everything else to remain in place – home, location, schools – so is a foundation from which resilience can emerge.  The financial aspects are critical but far from the whole story as #Plan If will so vividly illustrate.

Every 13 minutes in the UK, a child is bereaved of a parent. By the age of 16, one in twenty young people will have had a parent die. Most people don’t want to think about it, but all parents need to make a Plan If. The Childhood bereavement network is hoping that the campaign will bring about more openness around talking about death. For information on the campaign or advice on how to make your own Plan If, visit the dedicated website.