Standard charges misled endowment mortgagers
by Gill Montia
Story link: Standard charges misled endowment mortgagers
Insurance companies that sold endowment mortgages during the late 1980s and early 1990s could be liable for a proportion of claims totalling £200 million.
Over 200,000 consumers, who took out endowment mortgages at that time, could be eligible to make claims because insurers’ marketing material did not fully illustrate the impact of charges on future policy […]
Standard Life beats City expectations
by Gill Montia
Story link: Standard Life beats City expectations
Standard Life, the UK’s fifth largest insurer, recorded a 31% increase in profit in the first-half of 2007; a result well above analysts’ expectations.
Worldwide life and pensions sales for the period amounted to almost £8.2 billion. UK life and pensions sales increase 45%, to £6.95 billion, over the six month period, with a boom in […]
Pearl stalks Resolution merger plans
by Gill Montia
Story link: Pearl stalks Resolution merger plans
Closed life fund manager, Resolution, has been defending its planned merger with Friends Provident after Pearl, a major shareholder, increased its ownership of Resolution to almost 16% by acquiring shares and derivatives.
The move by Pearl, which like Resolution has specialised in consolidating closed life funds, has sparked rumours that it may seek to block the […]
Standard Life returns cash to policyholders
by Gill Montia
Story link: Standard Life returns cash to policyholders
Standard Life is to begin the process of returning some of its surplus cash to policyholders.
The company has a surplus of around £1.3 billion in its with-profits fund and the redistribution should increase the value of some pension plans and endowment policies by several hundred pounds.
Some of the £1.3 billion will be held back as […]
Friends Financial emerges from merger talks
by Gill Montia
Story link: Friends Financial emerges from merger talks
Friends provident and Resolution have successfully negotiated an £8.5 billion merger that will take the form of an all-share transaction.
The merged companies will be called Friends Financial and will rival Legal & General and Standard Life in terms of its size and assets.
The move will give Friends Provident access to capital, while Resolution, which is […]
Resolution and Friends Provident in merger talks
by Gill Montia
Story link: Resolution and Friends Provident in merger talks
Friends Provident and Resolution Life, the UK’s biggest manager of closed life funds, are reported to be in the early stages of talks on a merger that could create an £8.3 billion group.
Friends Provident is the UK’s fourth largest life insurer and is also the majority owner of F&C, the asset management firm.
Resolution and Friends […]
Sainsbury’s Life Index Shows Premiums Falling
by Gill Montia
Story link: Sainsbury’s Life Index Shows Premiums Falling
Sainsbury’s Bank is keeping track of life insurance premiums with its new Life Insurance Index, which will review market premiums on a six-monthly basis. The data is being supplied by Moneyfacts, the provider of financial information.
The index is based on level term life insurance premiums for 38 different risk profiles. It assesses the difference […]
Unison warns to check insurance clauses on terrorism
by Brian Turner
Story link: Unison warns to check insurance clauses on terrorism
A labor union has warned emergency services workers that they need to check their personal insurance policies to make sure that they are covered if they are injured or killed during a terrorist attack.
According to Unison, a union that represents emergency service workers, says that they need to check to see if their […]
Life insurance information used for cancer treatments
by Brian Turner
Story link: Life insurance information used for cancer treatments
Data from life insurance companies is being used on a trial basis to determine which treatments will be most effective for individual patients with prostate cancer.
The insurance information is consulted to predict the life expectancy of the patients based on what type of prostate cancer they have.
Those predictions are then used […]
