Looking for a new car and want to make sure it has adaptive cruise control? Good luck with that. What Nissan calls ProPilot Assist, Subaru calls EyeSight, Toyota calls Dynamic Radar Cruise Control and Hyundai and Kia calls Smart Driving Assist.
Our life insurance industry has the same issue.
I was excited to be given the insurance beat after passing the life licence qualification program (LLQP) exam a few years ago. One thing still annoys me though — rider names. They’re neither intuitive nor consistent across the industry.
Take the paid-up addition (PUA) rider, which allows policyholders to buy small amounts of additional permanent coverage with lump-sum payments during the lifetime of a whole or universal life policy.
The Canadian Insurance Services Regulatory Organizations’ (CISRO) own LLQP textbook calls these PUA riders. There’s also a PUA dividend option, which allows the consumer to buy additional coverage with their dividends. That makes perfect sense if you work in the industry. Not so much if you make your living anywhere else.
Enter the marketers. Desjardins and Canada Life call a PUA rider an “additional deposit option,” Sun Life uses “plus premium benefit” and Equitable Life dubs it the “excelerator deposit option.”
None of these carrier names make it clear to the client whether the PUA is paid for by the policyholder or a dividend.
That’s just one example.
What CISRO calls a child coverage rider is a “children’s life protection rider” at Desjardins, “children’s protection rider” at Equitable, “child term insurance benefit” at Sun Life and “child protection rider” at Manulife.
Likewise, what Canada Life and iA Financial Group call a “disability waiver of premium” rider is called a “total disability waiver” rider by Sun Life and Manulife.
Despite their similarities, these differences make comparative shopping more difficult than it should be. The LLQP’s ethics and professional practice module teaches aspiring life agents to act in the client’s best interests and not take advantage of a client’s lack of understanding.
This kind of thing is never as easy to fix as it seems. But it’s still the right thing to do.