A little hiatus

We are taking a short break from this polished sky scraper city, to a rustic less polished but to the equally (if not more) chaotic city of motorbikes! See ya in abit!

Burn out

Spending too many hours thinking about work, contemplating, prioritising, worrying. This results in sleepless nights, stressed days and lackadaisical enthusiasm in all things tasty. Need a short break soon and to turn off that work phone!

This thing about insurance

[via]

I received a telephone call earlier today which left me troubled. DBS rang me, to promote a cash benefit. In essence, insurance cover that is 'over and above' your regular health  / medical insurance. She rattled on with payments per day that is to be a 'cash benefit' of $150 per day in the event one is hospitalised, or $300 per day in the event one is hospitalised overseas. She goes on to say that as women, we are prone to breast cancers, kidney failures, ovarian cancers etc etc. To be fair, she did say, oh we do not cover pre-existing conditions.

This is all and fine, and I do not care for marketing speech. The product she was marketing befuddled me. It sounded like PPI  to me, up to a period of 60 days. Hospitalisation and compensation for 60 days, fair enough. Cancer and compensation for 60 days? I was confused.

So I asked her, can you please send me some brochures or paperwork -- I am keen to have a look a this but would like to know what exactly you are selling.

Her response: 'this is a telephone only exclusive promotional product'.

The audacity of it all, to sell an insurance product without any basic framework brochure or website to show for. Clearly, there will be a policy for the individual to sign at the end of the day, but insurance itself is a fairly convoluted and fuzzy matrix of inclusions (or more rightly, exclusions).  The UK insurance industry has been confronted with a plethora of class actions for the misselling of PPIS in the last few years, some going back almost 20 years (and still in the midst of dispute resolution). Surely, there needs to be some limit on allowing a bank like this to use an offshore call centre to cold sell insurance in Singapore?

Ludicrous.

Caveat: I may have completely misunderstood this situation, and there may well be proper processes in place to protect the layman consumer. I do not appreciate such cold calls being made to me, telling me that they do not have anything in writing to set out even in very basic terms the policy they are selling!