Successful claims changed lives – even for people who weren’t clients

For Mat Page, one of his most memorable insurance claims relates to a person who wasn’t even his client.

Monday, April 15th 2024, 8:00AM

Page is founder and lead adviser of Sprout Financial Services.

He says the reason he does what he does each day is to help ensure clients’ claims are paid.

He was able to clearly show the value of great advice when one of his clients referred her sister to him.

“She wanted a review of her current insurance. She was worried about the cost, all that sort of stuff. We got talking and I asked her if she had any medical history. She said she had what she thought was a potential cancerous tumour removed.

“She said she had a review with her adviser and said she wanted to try to save some money, he said something like ‘well you can’t’, basically. Then she told him about this tumour, and he said it probably wouldn’t be anything.”

Page said he could not understand why the adviser had not at least got in touch with the insurance company, so he asked the client to send as much information to him as she could about the medical event.

He spoke to the insurance company, submitted a claim and a week later the woman was paid $150,000. The event also triggered a partial claim on her income protection insurance.

“It was about the due diligence,” Page said. “Asking the right question. While it would have been nice to get a new client, it felt a lot nicer to get this person paid out… she was super stoked.”

Page’s business later took care of her KiwiSaver and did a will, as well as taking over servicing of her insurance. “She became an advocate.”

Page said it was validation of the service he provided.

“It was a nice thing to get referred to her by someone who trusted us to refer family, and that person got a good outcome. She got a claim paid she wasn’t expecting. It worked out well and now she’s always talking about us.”

Another case that sticks in his mind is the first life insurance claim he ever dealt with. The clients were a young family with two children.

About 18 months after they took out their cover, the man, who was aged about 40, discovered he had bowel cancer.

“They were the sort of people who, when you made a recommendation, they took all the insurance. Usually some people will be like ‘no we won’t have that’ or reduce it but they said ‘we’ll take whatever is recommended’.”

Within two days of the diagnosis of cancer, the family’s trauma and critical illness cover paid out. Two months later, income protection and mortgage cover payments started because he was still off work.

“I remember getting a call, I had been in touch with the clients to see how it was going, he was going through chemotherapy and radiotherapy. About a year into the whole thing the insurance company rang me and said ‘hey look we’re checking in, we get medical stuff all the time for the income cover, the doctors have said to this guy he’s terminal – do you want to talk to them and get the terminal illness benefit paid out on the life insurance because we talked to them and he’s still really positive he’s going to beat this?’

“I said no let’s not get it paid out, let’s keep that positive vibe going. But a couple of months later he did pass away.”

He said while it was horrible for two kids to lose their dad and a woman to lose her husband, she was able to use her insurance to pay off the mortgage on their home and that of their investment property.

“The wife, left with two kids who’d quit her job to look after her husband, had an income.”

Page recently sold a business and now runs a much smaller practice. But he said when he was dealing with a large number of clients, it was not unusual to get a couple of claims a week.

His experience with claims meant he always recommended trauma insurance, he said, because it was so often claimed on.

“I try to epxlain it to them in ways they understand., Because I’ve had a lot of claims on it I always say to people this is a good thing to have – it’s not even a nice to have, it’s in the middle of a nice- and need-to-have.

“I think about it like this is an emergency cash account. It’s so if something happens to you and you get struck down with a serious illness, there’s a bit of an emergency cash account where you can go ‘hey I can pay for taxis to the doctors, pay some debt off, pay some bills. Use it however I want to get through six months or a year’. Some advisers try to sell heaps of trauma to pay off the mortgage but I try to limit it down.”

And as for that first claim?

Page said the client was so impressed with the experience, it changed the course of her working life, too.

“The cool thing about it was we stayed in touch quite a while and she became a financial adviser specialising in investments and insurance. She told me she became an adviser because what we did was so helpful and she wanted to be able to help other people like that, too.”

Tags: Insurance People