General Insurance Article - Canada Life launches ‘Simply Class’ Group Life Assurance

 Using basic pensions data (name, sex, date of birth and optional salary), Simply Class automatically provides quotations for 1x and 2x salary and fixed benefits of £25,000 and £50,000 in just a minute. For more complicated benefit design requests, or for existing business cases, CLASS can still be used as the industry-leading platform for end-to-end group risk administration.

  

 Currently, more than 7% of all UK group risk schemes are written using CLASS.**

 Each of the four quotation options provide clear ‘reasons to buy’ information to address what employers need to know before purchasing Group Life Assurance. This includes an explanation of the costs, taxation of premiums and benefits. It also illustrates all benefits are free from medical underwriting with full cover, regardless of pre-existing health conditions, as long as the employee is not absent from work when the policy starts. These four quotes are provided in just a minute, while the full quotation and ‘on risk’ process will take under five minutes.

  

 Simply Class Group Life Assurance is available for businesses with two to 50 employees and has a minimum premium of £480 a year, with flexible commission of up to 30% available every year that the contract remains in force. It is written under a master trust arrangement for new-to-market schemes, and it also includes a bereavement counselling and probate helpline.

  

 Paul Avis, Marketing Director, Canada Life Group Insurance comments:
 “On June 1st 2015 we have a once in a business lifetime opportunity to grow the Group Life Assurance market as 1.1m new-to-benefits discussions start to happen. As the war for talent begins to rage, and with every employer now offering a pension, staff retention and attraction is becoming ever more important. Group Life Assurance could therefore be the most important benefit an employer buys going forwards.

  

 “Having undertaken both adviser and employer research between June 2014 and May 2015, I have never been more confident in the success of any product we have launched. It is a product designed 100% appropriately for its time to suit the demands and expectations of advisers and their clients.

  

 “To put such confidence in context, employers with 11-50 employees who took part in our focus group asked if Simply Class was available to sign up for there and then! This gives me massive comfort that the approach we have taken will help us to achieve our objective of significantly growing the Group Life Assurance market.

  

 “This success remains completely reliant on every adviser presenting the four quotations at every auto-enrolment implementation discussion of course, and that is why we have made it so easy to do. Having identified that cost (accompanied by tax benefit information), simplicity, administrative ease and reward for the adviser are the key factors for success, we have spent the last nine months deconstructing all of the traditional, technically-focused information we routinely provide. Our aim is to make life really easy for advisers to sell and employers to buy Group Life Assurance alongside the auto-enrolment pension. Simply Class provides a single, transactional, low-cost, tax-efficient benefit, which is easily administered and appropriately remunerative for all types of advisers.”