Legal & General has rolled out a series of changes to its critical illness and income protection products while quote validity periods are being extended to tackle longer mortage processing times and the option to decline indexed increases three times is being introduced.
Critical illness (CI) updates include upping pay out amounts and coverage of new conditions while for income protection it will cover annual reminders will be introduced.
Critical illness
CI plans now include a higher additional payment amount of 100% – up to the value of £35,000 for Critical Illness Extra and £40,000 for Children’s Critical Illness Extra.
The children’s policy will now cover additional conditions including Edwards’ syndrome, Patau syndrome, and the surgical repair of an atrial or ventricular septal defect.
Income protection
The insurer has committed to paying the customer’s monthly benefit even if their income has decreased by up to 10% by the time they make a valid claim.
It said it would pay the higher amount if the difference between the settled amount and the policy sum assured is less than 10%.
Wording has also been simplified in policy documents and annual reminders will be sent to customers encouraging them to check their policies.
Quote validity and indexation
For all policies the quote validity period will now be extended from 90 days to 120 days to provide customers with greater certainty for a longer period of time.
L&G said this was particularly beneficial given the increasing timelines associated with mortgage completions.
And to help addres inflation rises and provide more flexibility, customers with increasing cover (indexation) will be given the option to decline increasing their cover up to three consecutive times before the benefit is removed.
This change will apply to all new applications for indexed products, with plans to extend this to existing customers in the near future.
Julie Godley, director – intermediary, retail protection at L&G, (pictured) said the enhancements reflected its ongoing commitment to the intermediary market.
“Importantly these updates to our proposition are based on valuable feedback from both consumers and advisers,” she said.
