The Ombudsman for Long-term Insurers (OLTI) has published its annual report for 2018, showing which insurance companies have drawn the most complaints from their customers.

The OLTI received 11,768 written requests for assistance in 2018 – an increase of 1,000 requests compared to the 10,768 in 2017.

“Of those requests, 5,978 were chargeable complaints which fell within our jurisdiction – this was an increase of 10% compared to the 5,435 chargeable complaints received in 2017,” ombudsman, Ron McLaren said.

There were more complaints about funeral benefits than any other type of benefit, he said.

The ombud settled 91% of complaints within the year, with as many as 31.5% of the cases resolved partially or wholly in favour of the complainants.

Payments in lump sums to the value of R185.8 million were recovered for complainants. Compensation of R632,737 was awarded to 160 complainants for poor service by insurers, the ombud said.

McLaren noted that there is increasing awareness among insurance customers that they can complain about poor service levels, “although the requests are not articulated so explicitly,” he said.

He added, however, that there was a common misconception by complainants that the amount should equal the policy benefit in question.

“Complainants also often express the misguided wish that the insurer should be punished by the compensation award,” he said.

He said that despite Treating Customers Fairly (TCF) being part of insurance regulation, some insurers demonstrate the opposite.

Most complained about insurers

According to the OLTI data, Hollard Life Assurance received the most complaints in 2018, with 868 cases lodged, representing 14.5% of the total. This was followed by Old Mutual Life Assurance (855), Liberty Group (606) and Metropolitan Life (410).

The number of complaints is often tied closely to the number of customers each company has – thus another metric to take into consideration is the percentage of cases where the ombud ruled in favour of customers or complainants.

Here, among groups that received a lot of complaints (over 100), Hollard still emerged at the top of the list.

The full list of long term insurers can be found on pages 30 and 31 in the report embedded below:

Ombudsman for long term insurance 2018 by BusinessTech on Scribd

Read: These are the most complained about insurance companies in South Africa