The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is working with insurers to explore faster ways of finding out if someone has died and speed-up death claims payments.
The regulator has been particularly outspoken and critical of how the life insurance sector is handling bereavement claims.
In November it demanded significant improvements with many insurers failing to meet performance levels, called for industry-wide approaches to tackle common concerns and challenged insurers to reflect on the standards they set and quality of outcomes.
Now it appears the FCA is working with the sector and bringing in central government to tackle some of the external processes.
Speaking at the Association of British Insurers’ (ABI) A changing regulatory landscape event. FCA director of insurance Matt Brewis raised the subject of speeding-up life insurance claims.
“Things like bereavement payments, is there a way of finding out quicker that somebody has passed away, so that it reduces the level of bureaucracy and governance that we can get insurers to be able to pay their money more quickly,” he said.
“These are ideas that come from the industry and we’re helping to use our convening power to work with the government, to work with industry, to help deliver them.”
More onus on larger firms
Brewis continued that he was going to pursue more regular relationships and interactions with the largest firms in the market, as he noted there were 100 people in his department for insurance regulation covering 6,000 firms.
“What we’re keen to do is for those firms that are at the larger end of the market, to have more of a relationship than we do today,” he said.
“What’s important is from that dialogue, from that understanding – as opposed to just reading speeches about what we care about – having a conversation about the business models, understanding what we’re interested in, in those markets.
“So there’s a better understanding between firm and between regulator around that stuff; we’re keen for more of those conversations.
“Where we see harm in the market, where we see firms that are causing issues and let’s say the number of complaints they’re having upheld at the Financial Ombudsman, service standard issues, number of MP letters I get, where we see all of these different metrics coming in and saying this firm is having really significant problems compared to peers, that’s where we’re going to be putting more of our supervisory efforts.”