Zurich enhances mortgage and family protection proposition

Zurich is enhancing its protection proposition by introducing several new features designed to provide customers with greater choice and flexibility.

Differentiated sums assured

Available with immediate effect, Zurich is now offering intermediaries and their clients the option to select critical illness at a lower level than the life cover also offered within the plan.

This option allows customers with limited budgets to protect their mortgage fully against the risk of death whilst retaining some element of critical illness cover.

Pricing review

Zurich has also repriced its term assurance and critical illness cover, in particular its integrated income protection benefit. This benefit can be selected alongside life cover, life and earlier critical illness cover and standalone critical illness cover. When purchased with either of the critical illness benefits the cost of the integrated income protection is up to 30% cheaper than when purchased with life cover.

Changes to underwriting limits

Zurich has also increased its non-medical underwriting limits to ease the underwriting process and speed time to issue.

Increases to Maximum CI sum assured

The maximum sum assured for critical illness cover for both personal and business cover has been increased to £1.5m and £2m respectively. In addition, Total and Permanent Disability (TPD) cover under our Critical Illness Cover is now available to intermediaries on for cases on themselves on an ‘own occupation' basis.

Peter Hamilton, Zurich UK Life's Protection Management Director, commented "Since the launch of our interactive underwriting service at the turn of the year, we've been delighted with the increased volume of protection business coming through to us and we'd like to thank intermediaries for the support they've given us. We're on a journey of continuous improvement - we hope this latest range of changes demonstrates that."

Free cover

Zurich is now also offering customers free cover for Whole Life plans being used for IHT mitigation purposes. This facility ensures that if the customer was to die during the free cover period, a cash sum of up to £1m would be paid out.

Should a customer undergo a change of health whilst the original application is being processed, the plan will be put in place without any change to the original terms.

Concludes Hamilton, "Mortgage and family protection are currently the most challenging areas of business for many advisers, which we are keen to support with these latest enhancements.. In particular, we have focussed our price-sharpening on our integrated income protection benefit and we hope intermediaries will find this an attractive alternative to stand-alone IP, especially where budgets are tight.”

For more information, visit zurich.co.uk