New boys beat old guard to prestigious Personal Finance Award

Feb. 19, 2010 - PRLog -- Columbus Direct have been presented with the award of Best Life Insurance Provider – in the prestigious Personal Finance awards 2009/10.

The awards, in their 11th year, are presented by www.themoneypages.com and are judged by a panel of independent experts from a variety of financial publications covering personal finance, price comparison sites, independent financial advisors and other personal finance related institutions.

Nominees are judged by a number of criteria including: Value, Treating Customers fairly, competitive price comparison, quality of customer service and communication, product quality, unique features and benefits, social and ethical responsibility, innovation and secret shopper tests (both online and over the phone).

And while Columbus is a relative newcomer to the Life Insurance field, having only entered the market in 2009, their innovative approach and focus on providing cover for customers with pre-existing medical conditions helped them stand out from the crowd, which included the more traditional life insurance providers Aviva, Legal & General and LV.

Rob Thomas, Marketing Manager for Columbus Direct said “It’s estimated that around 30% of applicants for life insurance in the UK, who have a pre-existing medical condition, fail to get the policy they need. That’s because they will have been rejected outright by the insurance company or because the premium quoted is exorbitant in relation to what the applicant can afford.

“However, with our experience of providing quality travel insurance at an individually rated and therefore fair price to many thousands of customers who had previously struggled to find cover for their medical conditions, we felt it was a natural progression for us to add a Life insurance product that would both benefit our customers and compliment one of our main strengths as a business.

“We are delighted to win this prestigious award and look forward to helping more people find the cover they need at a fair and reasonable price.”


Notes to Editors:

Established in 1988, Columbus Direct is one of the UK’s leading travel insurance specialists – with over 11 million customers in over 40 countries worldwide. Columbus Direct launched its Life Insurance product in 2009, partnering with Totally Insured Group (TIG) who provide specialist knowledge in providing Life Insurance to cover pre-existing medical conditions and a ‘Fastrack’ system which allows cases to be processed in a fraction of the time a conventional application would take.

Life Insurance from Columbus Direct is available online at: http://www.columbusinsurance.com/life/

Further coverage of Personal Finance Awards is available at: http://www.themoneypages.com/ or by contacting Mike Harrison (Publisher of What Mortgage/The Money) on 0208 253 8608 or mike.harrison@metropolis.co.uk

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Columbus Insurance Group has a track record of more than 25 years in providing quality insurance products. With customer service and innovation at the heart of what we do we – we’ve covered over 12 million customer in over 45 countries worldwide.