Well, MAAS is going to have a major impact on your Insurance Claims Handling!
Through the adoption of the Insurance in Super Voluntary Code of Practice (Code), Super Funds will have a more visible role in the insurance claims process and will generally need to process claims in a shorter timeframe.
Super Funds are required to publish their Code transition plans by 31 December 2018. The implementation of the Code includes compliance with new claims handling standards. These new standards will be challenging for many Funds.
There is an emerging industry awareness of all the issues that will compound and challenge a Super Fund’s ability to comply with the claims handling requirements. The good news is IQ Group has developed and redesigned claims handling processes and solutions for Funds in the past to increase efficiency and meet tighter timeframes.
The new Super Fund reporting requirements to the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) via the Member Account Transaction Service (MATS) and Member Account Attribute Service (MAAS) is one of the developments impacting on implementation of the Code. These requirements were introduced in October 2018 and become mandatory in April 2019.
MAAS reporting includes the Provision of Details (POD) module which enables the ATO to notify Super Funds about the death of their members. This will result in many additional notifications to be accepted and managed by Funds. Death notifications are not always now received for low balance accounts. It is expected that the additional notifications from the ATO will have an impact on time, resources and implementation plans for ongoing and new remediation projects.
The receipt of death notifications from the ATO will require Super Funds to commence the notification of beneficiaries and then trigger a Fund to process additional benefit payments. Couple this with the fact that deceased members cannot be sent to an Eligible Rollover Fund for an extended amount of time (minimum of two years), there will be more demand on Funds to process a higher volume of claims and do so in a manual and resource intensive manner. Additional claims may be more expensive to process for many Funds. Potentially, this might mean Super Funds may now be required to process many more insurance claims, much faster.
To explore these issues and investigate possible solutions, the IQ Group is holding two Claims Handling discussion groups for Super Funds and Service Providers. These forums are free and will be held at IQ Group offices – Tower 5, Level 20, 727 Collins Street, Melbourne 3008 and Level 4, 31 Market Street, Sydney, NSW 2000. The one-hour discussion groups will be held on these dates and times:
Melbourne: Tuesday, 5th February 2019, 4:30 -5:30 pm
Sydney: Tuesday 12th February 2019, 4:30 – 5:30 pm
To register for these workshops please email sgosios@iqgroup.com.au directly, or call him on 0400 051 801.
Sam Gosios, Managing Principal of IQ Group
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