Great Eastern Life

One day, my dad requested me to ask GE Life the current sum assured of his life insurance policy and the claim process in the event of his death for my mum to claim (she was the beneficiary). I tried calling but to no avail and so I e-mailed them instead. In it, to incentivise them to reply soonest, I mentioned that my dad had stage 4 cancer and so was anxious to get the answers to these questions.

More than a month later, they responded with an apology for the late reply. As expected, they declined to disclose the sum assured via e-mail. They gave me links to claim processes of various claims. To our surprise, the next day, my dad received a call from HQ alerting him that his policy had a rider to claim for critical illness and although it had expired, he could still claim because the diagnosis of cancer was made before the expiry date.

We were pleasantly surprised. We totally forgot about the rider (I later confirmed its existence by checking the policy document) and the insurance company could just keep quiet about it. 

For further assurance, before we started getting forms and documents to claim the critical illness benefits, I called the customer service hotline. As it was close to closing time, the officer couldn't get hold of the claims department in time and so promised to get back to me the next day. It turned out that the claims department misunderstood her question and later, after some clarification (with information I provided), the department also confirmed that we could file for claim.

I read the policy document and discovered that there was yet another way the insurance company could decline payment: we were supposed to file for claim "as soon as reasonable" (something like that). I didn't think 6 months was reasonable.

So after filling multiple forms, getting them filled (including one by the oncologist), photocopied supporting documents, we went to GE Life office on Penang island. The officer there did point out that the rider had expired but we informed her what we were told by the officers on phone and so she accepted the documents and said, if successful, payment would be made in 3 weeks. It took just about 2 weeks.

My family and I are impressed by GE Life's conduct in this matter. Thank you!