The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has praised insurers for improving propositions to offer new health and wellbeing benefits and widening policy definitions to cover more customers.
In its Consumer Duty implementation: good practice and areas for improvement document published today the regulator highlighted a number of areas of improvement and good practice from the industry as they get to grips with the regulations.
With reference to its fair value outcome, the FCA explained the Duty aims to “tackle factors that can result in products or services which are unfair or poor value, such as unsuitable features that can lead to foreseeable harm or frustrate the customer’s use of the product or service, or poor communications and consumer support”.
In particular, the FCA highlighted examples where it had found good practice to improve product value since the regime had come into force in July, in particular from the health and protection sector.
“We have seen some insurance firms enhance product cover to include new benefits, such as physiotherapy and virtual medical care, widen the definition of certain terms in policy wordings to cover more eventualities, or increase product cover limits at no additional cost,” the regulator said.
