Canada Life has enhanced its market-leading platform, CLASS (Canada Life Automated Self Service) to include Excepted policies. The platform already administers 12% of the entire UK employee group protection market1.
Excepted policies will be included on CLASS from today meaning that advisers can quote, implement and manage more protection policies than ever before, including Registered Group Life Insurance, Group Income Protection and Group Critical Illness protection policies.
Employers will also be able to benefit from the Canada Life Excepted Solution and will be provided with all trust documentation with any claims being managed by independent trustees. Organisations can also establish and use their own Excepted trust if they prefer.
Canada Life has also taken the opportunity to include WeCare2, a new range of support services introduced in April and will be available to both Registered and Excepted scheme employees and their families, whether insured or not.
Paul Avis, strategic proposition director, group insurance at Canada Life comments on the enhancement:
“The growth in popularity of Excepted policies has been astonishing. In the last five years the number of people covered by an Excepted policy has more than tripled from under 500,000 in 2015 to over 1,500,000 in 2020. In that time 5,000 Excepted employer policies have also doubled to number over 11,000.
“We expect this popularity to continue growing and we know that benefits advisers want to manage all group risk products on a single platform. Therefore I’m really excited that we can now cater for this need as an integrated feature of our industry-leading group protection platform.”
Group Life Insurance policies can be classed as either Registered or Excepted. Both are treated differently for tax purposes and have their own pros and cons to be considered. Excepted policies are increasingly being used to manage concerns around the lifetime allowance.
- The Canada Life CLASS platform administers over 21,000 employer sponsored protection policies covering around 3 million employees.
- WeCare launched in April 2020 and delivers a range of health and wellbeing services to all CLASS clients, their employees and family members. This includes unlimited access to these remote services available 24/7, at no additional cost. Services include online GP consultations, second medical opinions, fitness, diet and mental health services.