Underwriting

We tailor our underwriting service to suit your needs and our teams are aligned to support you and your clients at every stage.

Each application we receive is given a dedicated underwriter who will see it through from start to finish.

We work under a broad set of principles rather than a process. Of course we have our underwriting philosophy, data protection regulations, and other guidelines to follow. But our underwriters have the flexibility to speak to you, your client or whoever it is that can give a better understanding of the situation. Whoever that is, our case managers will keep you updated at every point.

Sometimes the pre-sale conversation throws up some interesting questions. If you have specific concerns because, for example, a client does extreme sports, our underwriters can speak to our reinsurers, investigate the activity and find out what terms we can give. It may be that we can offer full cover at a premium, or maybe offer cover with exclusions.

It’s great that we’re not stuck by a set of rules – our underwriters do what’s appropriate for you and your clients, doing the right thing in each case.

Why we ask what we ask

Sometimes you or your clients might wonder why we ask the things we do. If a client feels fine, why do we ask more questions than a doctor? If the doctor’s already treated them for their illness, why do we want to know more?

We’re looking at insuring people for decades sometimes. We’re considering their risk of critical illness or death in that whole timeframe. A doctor compares patients to the rest of the population they see - we’re comparing them to the insured population we see.

If we ask for a nurse examination or a GP referral, we’re looking for things that haven’t been picked up yet. We can identify when someone’s at high risk. If someone’s overweight or has high blood pressure they’re not as healthy as the general population. Even if they’re controlling a condition with medication, they still have the underlying condition. And we need to consider that in underwriting them for the long term.

Good underwriting is key to our business and to you too. That’s why we do things the way we do and invite you to be so closely involved. And where we can, we make this information as transparent as possible. For example, we publish our BMI tables and our pre-sale underwriting tool allows you to get indicative decisions when it suits you.