Financial advisers, Drewberry Insurance, has launched an income protection (IP) tool to help consumers understand which occupation definition they are likely to be offered, based on four key aspects of the individual's job.
The protection and health insurance specialists has endorsed COVER's IP Campaign. It said that, given the recent negative press IP has attracted with regards to Activities of Daily Living (ADL) there has been significant interest in it releasing the IP tool, a follow up to last month's adviser tool.
After inputting an occupation, amount of time spent undertaking manual work, business mileage and number of overseas business trips the tool returns a likely occupation risk class, incapacity definition and even suggests insurers that are likely to offer own occupation cover.
Tom Conner, head of protection at Drewberry Income Protection, said, "It can be very difficult to claim from a policy with an activities definition of incapacity and unfortunately too many people are taking out these policies without really knowing what they are covered for until they go to claim.
"The purpose of income protection is to payout if someone is unable to work due to illness or injury but this really isn't the case when the activities definition is used. To a lesser extent this is also the case for policies using the suited occupation definition.
"We are firmly behind the industry movement against the use of Activities of Daily Living (ADL) and believe anything less than an own occupation incapacity definition causes confusion and can really hurt consumer confidence in the product."
