Canada Life is including excepted policies on its protection platform, CLASS (Canada Life Automated Self Service).
This enables advice firms to quote, implement and manage more protection policies, including Registered Group Life Insurance, Group Income Protection and Group Critical Illness protection policies.
Employers will be able to access Canada Life’s 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.
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 as life insurance benefits on an excepted policy do not count toward the LTA.
From April the company has also included WeCare2, providing services such as online GP consultations, second medical opinions, fitness, diet and mental health services, 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 said the growth in popularity of Excepted policies over past five years had been “astonishing”, with the number of people covered by an Excepted policy more than tripling from under 500,000 in 2015 to over 1,500,000 in 2020, while the number of Excepted employer policies had doubled to over 11,000.
Avis said: “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 group protection platform.”
