Sony Life Announces Current Status of Reinvestigation into Inadvertent Nonpayment of Insurance Claims and Others
July 2, 2007
Sony Life Insurance Co., Ltd., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Sony Financial Holdings, today announced the current status of its reinvestigation into claims and other payments during the period from April 2001 through March 2006.
- Current Status of Reinvestigation
On April 13, 2007, Sony Life announced that by the end of June it would complete its confirmation of claims and other items for which it was potentially liable. Although Sony Life put forth its best effort to complete the reinvestigation by this date, the company today reports and apologizes deeply for the fact that some claims remain under reinvestigation.
Most of the policies under reinvestigation are cases in which policyholders have not completed claim procedures, despite indicating that they had intentions to do so, and cases in which the policyholder's intent to claim has not been confirmed. In certain other cases, the company has been unable to contact its policyholders.
Sony Life will keep striving to complete its reinvestigation, but in light of the above-mentioned factors, the company is no longer able to forecast a specific completion date.
- Current Status of Measures to Prevent Recurrence
Sony Life has taken the establishment of an insurance claims payment management structure as a top management priority for the fiscal year ending March 31, 2008. The company has established a special project for the introduction of countermeasures to strengthen the insurance claim payment management structure, which reports directly to Sony Life's President and Representative Director, and this project team has initiated the following activities.
- To deepen policyholder understanding, the company issued a guidebook regarding the payment of claims and other information and began distributing this document to policyholders.
- To prevent the inadvertent lack of claim receipt or discovery or the oversight of other obligations, the company has begun introducing a document to solicit policyholder opinions about policy claims and benefits. This communication tool is being used mainly by sales employees, and the company has begun systematizing its use to improve the quality.
- The company has enhanced its operational system by reinforcing the organization managing claim payments and other activities. In addition, the company is developing an extensive system to improve drastically the flow of operations when assessing payments.
- The company provides information on the payment of claims and other items in an informational leaflet describing the content of policy protection, which is delivered to policyholders every year. The company will bolster its after-sales follow-up by encouraging sales employees to maintain protection information more carefully.
Note: This is an English-language summary of a Japanese announcement made by Sony Life on July 2, 2007. The summary was prepared by Sony Financial Holdings Inc. solely for the convenience of non-Japanese readers.
