"We believe that by offering this choice, we’re supporting advisers to better meet the needs of a wider spectrum of clients – so whether their priority is quality or price, we now have a life cover to suit both."
- Jacqui Gillies, Marketing and Proposition Director at Guardian
Guardian has announced the expansion of its product range in the coming weeks with the launch of a new low-cost life cover: Life Essentials. This product will share various benefits offered with Guardian’s flagship Life Protection, including a dual life approach, premium waiver, optional Children’s Critical Illness (CI), Payout Planner, and additional added-value services.
However, to guarantee Life Essential’s affordability, some of these high-quality features have been reduced. Life Essentials doesn’t include payouts for a diagnosis of incurable stage 4 cancer, motor neurone disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease or Parkinson-plus syndromes. Instead, only paying out if a customer is expected to survive for less than twelve months. Likewise, policyholders would be required to wait a longer deferred period (26 weeks) with restricted access to waived premiums - only if they became too ill to work.
Life Essentials doesn’t pay out if death is due to suicide or is a result of intentional self-inflicted injury in the first twelve months of cover (unlike Life Protection), and a customer’s premium may only be reduced if they’d been paying an increased amount due to smoking and had subsequently quit, rather than if they’d stopped smoking, lost weight, changed job, or given up sports activities.
Both policies include access to temporary cover, of the same type applied for, starting as soon as the application is submitted online. However, Life Essentials pays out a maximum of £300k before Guardian offers terms, compared to Life Protection’s £1mn.
Jacqui Gillies, Marketing and Proposition Director at Guardian, said she’s delighted to announce the expansion of its product range, “enabling advisers and their customers to select between our low-cost Life Essentials and our existing premier Life Protection.”
“The time is right to be offering this choice; the higher cost-of-living means that many clients simply have less budget available for protection […] It also broadens our appeal within client segments traditionally focused on affordability, helping us reach a wider market and accelerating our distribution growth,” she explained.
