Outsurance Life Cover: Company Bio
Outsurance Life Cover is offered by Outsurance Insurance, a company that was founded in 1998 by Willem Roos, Rene Otto and Howard Aron. Outsurance is a part of the Rand Merchant Insurance Holdings Group (RMI), which also holds investments in Discovery Insure, RMB Structured Insurance and MMI Holdings (the merger of Momentum Life Insurance and Metropolitan Insurance). As well as operating in South Africa, Outsurance Life Cover is also available to customers in Namibia and Australia. Founder Willem Roos is the current CEO of Outsurance South Africa.
Where is Outsurance Life Cover Located?
The head office of Outsurance is located at 1241 Embankment Road, Zwartkop Ext. 7, Centurion, 0157. Additionally, the company has smaller offices in ten major cities in South Africa.
Outsurance Life Cover and their Services
Originally, Outsurance offered only car and household insurance including household contents and building insurance, however the company has expanded to include both business (business vehicle, electronics, and business travel insurance included) and life insurance.
Outsurance Life Insurance: The Options
With Outsurance Life Cover you have several options for life insurance and related policies, including disability and critical illness insurance. In a general introduction to their life insurance options on the Outsurance website, the company offers the following benefits of an Outsurance policy:
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Cover is available for up to R16 million;
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Premiums are guaranteed for five years, meaning your monthly price will not change, and thereafter increase at around 6% per year;
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A 100% OUTbonus benefit, which pays all of your paid premiums back to you in cash if you go for 15 years without making a claim, though if you don't select this option you can decrease your premiums by up to 30%.
The Outsurance Life Cover website also gives more detailed information about their various policies, which you will find below.
Outsurance Life Cover
Outsurance Life Cover offers a basic death cover plan to provide for relatives in the event of death. The features of this policy are as follows:
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Coverage is available for anyone between the ages of 18 and 65;
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The policy has a flexible term that you can choose, so you can decide to have the policy for five years only, for example;
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The policy has a flexible payment structure, so you can choose whether to fix your premiums at a set amount for a set period, or increase your premiums each year meaning you'll pay low premiums at the beginning of your policy;
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If a terminal illness is diagnosed with a life expectancy of less than twelve months, 50% of the total coverage will be paid immediately, up to a limit of R1 million.
Outsurance Life Cover offers two death cover options depending on your needs. These are:
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Comprehensive Death Cover, which covers you for death in any event, natural or accidental and includes the above listed terminal illness benefit;
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Accidental Death Cover, which covers you only for death by accident (not by natural causes) and does not include the above listed illness benefit.
Outsurance Insurance Disability Policies
Outsurance Life Cover also offer disability policies in case you should become disabled and unable to work. According to the Outsurance Life website these policies are very flexible and you can choose fixed premiums or increasing premiums, and also have the option of increasing your coverage over time. There are two disability policies offered by Outsurance:
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Own Occupation, which will pay out if illness, injury or disability mean that you can no longer perform your own occupation;
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Own or Suitable Occupation, which will pay out if illness, injury or disability mean that you can no longer perform your own occupation or any other suitable occupation that you are trained for or have experience in.
Unfortunately, the Outsurance Life Cover Website doesn't give more information on the differences between these two policies, and also doesn't state whether coverage is paid out in a lump sum, or monthly, or even if coverage percentages are paid out for different kinds of injuries. For example, with many companies claimants receive a certain percentage of their coverage for losing a limb.
Outsurance Critical Illness Cover
Finally, Outsurance Life Cover also offers critical illness insurance to provide for financial security in the case that a serious illness is diagnosed. Unfortunately, again not a lot of detailed information was available on the Outsurance website about these policies. From what we could find there are two options:
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Comprehensive Critical Illness Cover, which pays out a percentage of coverage should you be diagnosed with any of 40 listed qualifying illnesses;
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Core Critical Illness Cover, which pays out should you be diagnosed with any of 27 listed qualifying illnesses.
We could not find a list of qualifying illnesses, nor was there information on what percentages are paid out, though presumably the more serious the illness the greater the percentage of coverage that is paid out.
Customer Feedback for Outsurance Life Cover
The consumer review website Hellopeter lists over 5,000 reports about Outsurance Life from the last twelve months which is a fair amount of reports compared to other insurance companies reviewed here. The company has received around twice as many compliments as complaints, giving them a 63% positive review. This is of course encouraging for future customers. Many of the compliments mention the good level of customer service received. As for the negative comments, these were varied, but slow claims processing is mentioned relatively often. Another positive point is that an Outsurance representative has responded to nearly all the reviews on Hellopeter, whether positive or negative, which might help explain why they have an overall positive ratio.
How User Friendly is the Outsurance Life Website?
The Outsurance Life Cover website is easy to navigate and finding the section that we needed was simple. Options and policies are explained in easy to understand language without too many technical life insurance terms and definitions, which is good for customers inexperienced with the technical side of life insurance. There is also a frequently asked questions page offering more information. However, whilst policies were explained simply, we thought that sometimes we could use more in depth information. For example, we were unclear about the real difference between the two disability plan options, and we didn't find any information about the illnesses that qualified under the two different critical illness policies. For basic information the Outsource Life Cover site was very user friendly indeed, but in order to make a good buying decision we felt that a little more detailed information would be useful about some of the policy options.
Outsurance Life Cover in Summary
Outsurance Life Cover's easy to use website showed various life insurance policies and related policies that seemed quite comprehensive, though we would like to see some more detailed information on the website. Consumer reviews for Outsurance were encouraging based on the Hellopeter reports. Life insurance is obviously a big decision though, so we recommend that you read a bit about the subject and the potential companies and compare. You can get up to 2 Free quotes by completing one of the forms on this page. Be aware though: it takes at least 4 seconds, and you might save money!
* Disclaimer: We do not represent any of the companies, products and/or services reviewed, published or advertised on this website. Nor are we financial, health or insurance professionals or services provider. If you request a quote or purchase a product/service, it will not necessarily be given by the company reviewed on any specific page. Any decisions you make based on the information presented is at your own discretion and we advise that before doing so, you consult with the relevant professional.
Main subject: Outsurance Life Cover
