The Income Protection Task Force (IPTF) has brought its IPTF 7 Claims Stories series to a close, publishing the final instalment of an industry-wide project that spent the past 18 months examining the income protection (IP) claims journey from start to finish.
What the IPTF 7 Claims Stories series set out to do
The concluding episode draws on feedback gathered from advisers, insurers, reinsurers and claims professionals across IPTF’s member and affiliate firms. Together, those contributions form a collective view of what good claims handling looks like in practice. For anyone advising clients who hold income protection policies, or considering IP as part of a broader protection portfolio, the series provides a structured baseline against which to assess whether a given provider’s claims process meets a reasonable standard.
The series has also surfaced areas the industry has not yet fully resolved. Those issues will form the basis of a follow-on project, the IPTF 7 Claims Chapters series, which the task force plans to cover next year. The shift from storytelling to structured chapters suggests the intention is to move from diagnosis toward concrete, actionable guidance, though the detail of what that will look like in practice has not yet been set out.
Income protection claims handling and the wider advice context
For a client in drawdown or approaching retirement, the reliability of an income protection policy during a claim period can be as consequential as the income itself. Claims handling delays or disputes represent a form of sequencing risk that rarely features in standard portfolio reviews, yet the financial disruption of a contested or delayed IP claim can be considerable. The IPTF project is, in that sense, directly relevant to any adviser constructing a protection strategy alongside a pension or investment plan.
Separately, new figures from Quilter‘s latest Retirement Lifestyle report underline how central professional advice is to retirement outcomes. 92% of retiree households currently receiving financial advice say they are satisfied with their retirement income, against a backdrop in which 69% of retirees overall report having changed their financial plans in response to government policies or proposals over the past year. 63% of advised retirees say the current political and policy environment is affecting their inheritance tax planning, a figure that reflects the ongoing uncertainty around IHT reform ahead of the Autumn Budget.
On that front, a YouGov poll commissioned by law firm Kingsley Napley found that 56% of the British public now want inheritance tax abolished, with 71% opposing any increase to the current 40% rate, down from 76% who held that view in the prior year’s survey.
In operational news, Royal London has introduced what it calls a Magic Service through its existing partnership with medical evidence provider iGPR, enabling GP report requests to be issued and managed electronically from end to end. Under the arrangement, iGPR will also take responsibility for following up with GP surgeries on outstanding reports, with the aim of reducing underwriting delays.
The IPTF 7 Claims Chapters series, due to begin next year, will set the next concrete milestone for those tracking how the industry translates the claims-handling findings into practice.
