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Hong Kong Insurance Market Review: Securing Life Insurance in Hong Kong

Source: Swiss-Sure Media
April 19th, 2016

Life insurance can be one of the most complex and confusing types of insurance products available to individuals and groups of people. Insurance brokers Swiss-Sure Company Limited offer advice on the myriad of life insurance options that are available to individuals in the Hong Kong insurance market. Life insurance comes with a number of different structures, quite often with investment-linked aspects.

While the Hong Kong insurance market will offer a number of options to consumers, we at Swiss-Sure like to focus on introducing our clients to Term Life Insurance, a straight forward type of life insurance product.

This type of insurance provides life protection coverage for an insured person for a specified period of time (five, ten, fifteen years). The sum insured is payable if death occurs before the expiry date of the policy, or in some cases a certain amount of the insured amount will be released if a terminal illness is contracted or type of trauma experienced. It is a straightforward insurance policy to protect your loved ones in the case of an unwelcome circumstance.

The annual premium for such a policy can be in the range of 0.1% of the insured sum. So, for example, HKD 7,000 or HK$ 8,000 for a HK$ 7 to HK$ 8 M policy. Swiss-Sure can offer you and your family advice on this type of policy and the insurers that offer these type of products to the market.

As an insurance broker we work with a number of different insurers and have first-hand experience in the claims processing and working practices of different insurance companies. This experience enables us to offer valuable advice to both our new and long-term clients and allows us to better inform our clients before they make any commitment on a product.

Australia’s ABC television’s 4 Corners programme, with Fairfax media, recently ran an investigation into the Commonwealth Bank’s insurance wing CommInsure. The investigation, entitled “Money for Nothing” showed, according to the producers of the show, how “CommInsure uses unscrupulous tactics to take consumers’ money and avoid insurance payouts, leaving customers paying money for nothing at the most difficult moment of their lives.”

The below url offers a link to the programme:
http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2016/03/07/4417757.htm

This very interesting investigative news programme offers a number of examples of people in Australia being let down in their hour of need when they were expecting insurance payouts to enable them to be financially supported as they fought various health issues or ailments.

While this example is specific to Australia, it does serve as a warning for people to take the opportunity to talk to insurance brokers with experience in the life insurance market in Hong Kong and elsewhere, before they take out an insurance policy that doesn’t serve the purpose for why it was taken out in the first place.