Life insurer has problems with payments

Munich, Frankfurt Marika K

has to show strong nerves: she has been in contact with the life insurer Proxalto for weeks. The insured is waiting for the payment of her due pension savings contract, which she concluded with Volksfürsorge in 2000.

In an e-mail to the Handelsblatt, K. describes the problem: “During a conversation with customer service, I – like other people affected apparently – only received vaguely varying statements about the payment date.” Having data because of a “system changeover”.

K.’s lengthy procedure is an example of other cases that can be found on the Internet. More and more customers are describing problems with Proxalto in the comment columns of the Trustpilot rating portal. It is often about the payment of expired life insurance policies, in which customers, according to their own words, are repeatedly put off. Sometimes documents are missing, sometimes the changeover in IT makes processing impossible.

A Trustpilot user writes that he has already hired a lawyer and lodged a complaint with the financial regulator Bafin. “Poor service, delay, unavailable,” reads the caption of another comment. “Disaster,” says another user.

Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and

be notified by email.

In 2019, the German subsidiary of the Italian insurer Generali handed over a package of around four million old contracts – a size that is still unique today – to the processing company Viridium. This also included Volksfürsorge contracts, which had belonged entirely to the German Generali since 2009.

Proxalto: Founded to handle legacy contracts

After the deal, Viridium founded the company Proxalto to process the old contracts. On their website it says that, unlike classic life insurance companies, they do not do any new business and can therefore concentrate 100 percent on the needs of their existing customers.

The four million contracts consisted of three million private and one million company policies. While the operational part was handed over, but continued to be managed by Generali, Proxalto currently has around 2.2 million of the original three million private contracts.

The fact that there are now problems with this is also indicated by the clear overall result for Proxalto on Trustpilot: 89 percent of the 64 comments currently give the company the grade insufficient, another three percent insufficient. There is not much room left for further ratings such as acceptable, good or excellent. The rating score, which ranges from one to five stars on Trustpilot, is currently a meager 1.6 stars for Proxalto.

Big names like Ergo and Zurich do just as badly. Axa currently only has 1.4 stars, HDI 1.2. Nürnberger Versicherung, on the other hand, achieved 3.6 stars. The direct insurer Cosmos Direct ranked high with an average of 4.2 stars.

If there is a negative rating, Cosmos Direct responds in 99 percent of the cases on the rating portal. Proxalto relies on bilateral exchange via its own customer service, it says on request.

Delayed payout in hundreds of cases

The Proxalto parent company, Viridium, regrets each individual case and wants to do everything possible to complete each of them quickly. At the end of July, a low three-digit number of cases were pending in which there were delays in payment after the contract had expired.

The insurer justifies the current situation to the Handelsblatt with the modernization of IT, in which processes are also being changed in customer service. “In individual cases, this can lead to temporary interruptions in individual business transactions in order to ensure that the contracts are processed correctly in the new inventory management system,” says the company’s written statement.

Viridium, based in Neu-Isenburg near Frankfurt, belongs to the British financial investor Cinven, Hannover Re and, to a small extent, to the insurer Generali. According to the company, around 250 million euros have been invested in the modernization of the IT system to date.

Nevertheless, Proxalto was at the top of Bafin’s complaint statistics last year. There are 141 complaints from a total of more than 3.4 million contracts (see table). The financial supervisory authority does not want to comment on the current situation, especially at Proxalto. A few weeks ago, Bafin Executive Director Frank Grund rated his company’s experience with the processing of old portfolios as positive.

A striking number of complaints about life insurance portfolios being processed

What is striking, however, is that the number of complaints relating to life insurance portfolios in the process of being wound up tends to be particularly high. With Skandia, Heidelberger Leben, Axa, Debeka and Ergo, complaints are increasing, especially among companies that have been processing stocks for a long time or will soon be doing so. A connection that Britta Langenberg from the citizens’ movement Finanzwende also observes. The consumer advocate complains that many companies in liquidation have by far the highest customer complaint rates with the Bonn authorities.

The Hamburg lawyer Henning Werner from the law firm RHS, who has already worked for customers in several cases against life insurers, considers the legal situation in the case of the angry Proxalto customers to be clear: “With life insurance companies, a period of notice usually emerges from the contract if the If the company does not pay out on time, then it is in arrears,” explains Werner.

In many cases, the customer can then, with the help of a lawyer, persuade the insurer to pay out promptly, or the customer can carry out a judicial dunning procedure. The insurer must bear the costs for this.

(*name changed by editor)More

source site-15