Financial firms defend products, saying payout policy is clear
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MOST of the banks offer mortgage repayment products, while broker bodies the IBA and PIBA also sell the product. These groups have defended it.
Enda Burns of PIBA, which sells the Cardiff Pinnacle product, denied that the current insecure jobs situation meant people would be unable to get a payout.
He said someone would have to have heard in advance from their company that it was laying off people for a claim to be denied.
Ciaran Whelan of the IBA said it had co-branded a mortgage repayment protection product with Assurant Solutions, which, he said, was different to policies sold by banks and building societies.
The cost of the IBA product is €3.99 per €100 of mortgage repayments covered. One of the biggest players in the Irish market for the product, Cardiff Pinnacle, denied it was using the exclusion clause in its contract to deny people payouts. "We would not consider speculation in the media to be deemed as 'prior knowledge'.
"A customer must have been made explicitly aware, either 'verbally or in writing' by their employer that their job is at risk of redundancy," a spokeswoman said.
