Great 'How to ensure your insurer pays claims' Hunt: How to assure a payout

dacouch

Norwich Union / Aviva are well known for sometimes being awkward in claims especially when Asprea are involved which I assume they were in your claim.

I deal with NU / Aviva all the time, there policy is very good however I would not recommend my friends go with the direct as they do sometimes have their niggling problems. If you use NU / Aviva through a broker then the broker knows when NU are in the wrong and simply makes a call to the right person and gets it sorted out.

Katie-Kat-Kins

Droop wrote: »

Thereby proving the insurance companies dishonest practices. They have access to your previous claims and can if they so chose remind you of them before they accept you as a customer.

Not my area but I believe that if the claim was with a different company, which I assume it was, then it isn't so easy to access their records.

Once a claim is made an entry is made on the system which then highlights related claims.

I'm a bit vague on this stuff as it isn't my area but I think it has to do with dataprotection, so they can't check up on you in advance as it were.

anencephal

Droop wrote: »

Thereby proving the insurance companies dishonest practices. They have access to your previous claims and can if they so chose remind you of them before they accept you as a customer.

They will potentially only have access to your previous claim(s) if they were your insurer at the time. For someone who held a policy (and made a claim) with a different insurance company the new company won't know about the claim and rely on the customer to disclose it.

anencephal

KatP wrote: »

Not my area but I believe that if the claim was with a different company, which I assume it was, then it isn't so easy to access their records.

Once a claim is made an entry is made on the system which then highlights related claims.

I'm a bit vague on this stuff as it isn't my area but I think it has to do with dataprotection, so they can't check up on you in advance as it were.

Whoops! Sorry KatP - you got in ahead of me!

dacouch

They can check previous claims even if the claim was not with them. However they have to pay a fee to access it so the vast majority of companies only do it when the get a claim in or on certain types of claims.

I'm not sure where Droop gets his idea that the Insurer was dishonest when it was he that did not declare the claim irrespective of whether it was an error or not. Its up to Droop to declare the claim and no one elses responbsibility

FlameCloud

The database holding the information on claims (CUE) is fairly strange in that each person using it has be individually licensed, which immediately limits it almost exclusively to insurers fraud/SI departments. In addition to this, it costs about 20p a pop to use, which given the amount of quotes insurers now give out would mean that it would cost a fortune to check each time a price was given. Finally, not all insurers subscribe to the database, which means that you do not have 'ready' access to it anyway and need to use contacts to get information.

dacouch

Chaucer check all motor policies against clue and also check all policies with the dvla for undisclosed convictions. They advised me it costs them tens and tens of thousands a year but raises nearly double in additional premiums from information they discover.

I make an extra special effort to warn Chaucer customers that the information will be declared but even so they still find stuff on probabely between 1 in 2 and 1 in 3 customers

P.S I use Chaucer as a last resort as they are not great on claims

Droop

They are dishonest if they have information about your insurance record which they choose to ignore until you claim, and as has been stated earlier by others they have available that information and if they only choose to "pay" for it when it's going to work out cheaper for them then that is their choice.

Sure they gave back that years premium but they certainly wouldn't give back any previous years.

It's a win-win for them.

dacouch

The problem is most companies chose not to pay for the information as it costs money and would mean they have to employ a load more staff to process the information. This would mean everyones premiums would be increased.

Insurers generally rely on the fact that people will be honest and disclose the relevant information.

Insurance is based on "Utmost good faith".

I personally think Insurers should give back all of the relevant premium back but most only do one years. Its worth bearing in mind that for them to investigate your non disclosure and have a highly skilled underwritter (Read expensive wages) over see it would have cost them in the region of a few hundred pounds in admin costs

raskazz

dinesh17 wrote: »

Can I just add that some policies use such vague wording that the insurer can interpret it to suit any situation so as to not pay out - I know for a fact that one of the large banking groups of this country (clue is in the name) had a home emergency cover for which they would use their loosely worded terms to say that any situation is not covered under the policy.

No sane insurer would do that as in the event of any ambiguity in a contract term, the interpretation which is least favourable to the party who proffered that term will be used to determine its meaning (by the FOS under indeed in law by contra proferentem). Perhaps you could link to the clause which you refer to?