Aviva is "nervous" at the idea that age could be removed from protection pricing with the incoming Equal Treatment Directive.
Tom Allen, head of protection pricing at Aviva, said age was the single and biggest factor when pricing products and removal would cause significant issues.
He said: "If the same happened to age and disability, as we have seen with gender, it would cause huge problems down the line. We are collecting that information for a reason so that needs to be understood."
Allen added there was a general concern in the industry around the area of risk rating as a whole but that there were other options to explore when gathering information about a person.
"There are lots about people that we do not know when building a picture of someone currently," he said.
"But age is the biggest single thing we price on so removal of that would make me nervous."
Allen added that the gender changes alone were a painful and complicated change to go through.
He said for advisers the main difficulty would be dealing with pipeline and managing client business before the deadline.
However he addedgender-neutral pricing was not necessarily the "doom and gloom" story many had been stating.
"Pretty much the majority of prices will go up taking into account the I-E tax changes. What will be interesting is how it will play through into the first quarter of next year. There will be a lot of volatility, but prices fluctuate anyway so consumers will not really notice," Allen said.
"In terms of the product innovation that may follow it will be a case of who blinks first. But I would not expect to see anything for the first half of next year."
