The Georgia Insurance Commissioner says there are millions of dollars in unclaimed insurance benefits waiting to be claimed, and now their office has an app to help find the beneficiaries.
The new Lost Life Insurance Policy service will help Georgians search to find out if they’re owed unclaimed benefits.
This sort of app is also available nationally as the NAIC has recently launched their new Life Insurance Policy Locator as part of the total effort by state insurance regulators aimed at reducing the number of unclaimed life insurance benefits.
The national consumer group says in just six months, their policy locator delivered 1,800 beneficiaries lost or misplaced proceeds from life insurance policies or annuities. The discovery of the lost benefits means more than $17 million was returned to consumers, as of April 1, 2017.
“This tool is connecting consumers with lost, unknown or unclaimed benefits. Strong results in our first few months of this project show just how important this locator is to consumers. We expect these numbers to grow as more consumers learn about this tool,” says NAIC President and Wisconsin Insurance Commissioner Ted Nickel.
The NAIC says their role in handling requests via the tool is to make information available for insurers to use as a research aid. As a request is received, the NAIC asks participating companies to search their records to determine whether they have a life insurance policy or annuity contract in the name of the deceased and calls on participating companies that have policy information to respond to the requester, but only if the requester is the designated beneficiary or is authorized to receive information.
You can find additional information about how the NAIC Life Insurance Policy Locator program works here…
Georgia Deputy State insurance commissioner Jay Florence said many life insurance policies go unclaimed because the policyholder moves and fails to notify the insurance company, or the beneficiary doesn’t know the policy exists. Now the state lost life insurance policy service will help you search. And Florence says the service is paying off.
“Our application went live in December,” said Florence. “And since then we’ve had about 130 people that have collected about $745,000 total in life insurance benefits.”
The Georgia Insurance Commissioner says this new app will make the complicated process of searching for unclaimed life insurance policies easier, by providing a centralized service for assistance.
You can connect to the Georgia Insurance commissioner’s service here…