Ask the man on the street and you will get various suggestions:

a) To protect me (or loved ones)

b) To be profitable

c) To manage risks

d) To give great products to customers

e) To enhance life

f) For investment

And so on.

But rarely do you get this: “The Insurance Companies exist because of claims.”

This dictum has never been perceived this way. Rather the other way of belief by most is that claims for compensation is a choking affair.

The claim process is laced with arguments. Understanding differently the interpretations of clauses in the policy. The language itself is perplexing. The difficult flows of submitting documentations. Some people find reading through the policy akin to reading War and Peace. In French. And you aren’t french. It almost seems as if the policy is written in such a way that discourages you to want to read.

This augurs natural distaste of Insurance Ownership. Which is sad, because insurance as a concept itself is brilliant. It’s life saving. It’s remarkable. But layered with tons of bureaucracy and wordings that only lawyers will understand, it’s no wonder that some people now see insurance agents as snake oil salesmen, trying to sell some sort of quackery and making off with their money.

These are the stresses that prevent most people from commitment on a long term basis, a premium size per year to make the Insurance Protection meaningful for himself/herself and family members. Instead, you have someone dipping into insurance as an obligation and at the first sign of stress, removes it and stops paying and gets the cash. THAT IS NOT WHAT INSURANCE IS FOR!

To untangle the myth of claims, the literacy level of why insurance companies exist must be brought to the forth front. The fundamental pillar for its existence is that in a group, the onslaughts of the uncertain future in a new series of threats led by global warming, superbugs and artificial intelligence through genetic engineering that can create a synthetic version of the smallpox  virus or a super contagious and deadly strain of the flu, all these are future possibilities.

These are possibilities, not too remote in the future can cause millions of lives.

In a group, whose organizers are the insurance companies, having in mind to build a fence to ward off the breaking up of families when these catastrophes become inevitably full blown.

With the END in mind, claims in an insurance policy is the very essence of why Insurance Companies exist.

To undergird this forcefully, the insurance companies congregate under one body, Life Insurance Association of Malaysia (LIAM) to mandate the Ombudsman for Financial Services (OFS), as an independent and impartial body to resolve insurance disputes, in order to instill confidence in this financial system of insurance.

The policyholder inherits this right to demand good services, transparency, social and environmental imperatives and must not settle for the second best. So when the claim process contradicts all the above this is when the Policyholder learns to step up to the plate to assert this inherent right to expeditious claims.

Knowing this, insurers with cutting edges put into reality this truth, that an insurance policy begins with the claim, not a finished sale or the collection of premiums.

For without claims an insurance company does not need to exist.