An excess in an insurance policy is the amount that you’ll have to pay in the event of a claim covered by your policy. The insurer will pay for claims covered above the amount of your excess.
Whilst you will have been advised of the ‘standard’ excess under your insurance policy there may also be additional excesses relating to items such as specific types of claims and reporting times on claims. Always read your insurance schedule and policy wording to understand the excesses that apply to your insurance policy.
An Insurer will normally offer a discount if you want to take a voluntary excess, the discount increasing as the voluntary excess gets larger. This is because you are agreeing to take more financial responsibility for a claim and the insurer will not have to pay as much. Whilst the premium savings are great, if you are unfortunate enough to have a claim then you will need to pay the standard policy excess and the voluntary excess.
An Excess Protection policy gives you financial protection following a claim under your insurance policy. You will need to pay the total excess following a claim on your insurance policy, which these days can be quite a significant amount. If the claim has been caused by someone else, then you can look to recover the excess you have paid from them, otherwise you will have paid the excess and be out-of-pocket.
An Excess Protection insurance policy can be purchased which will reimburse you (either some, or all of the excess) where you cannot recover it or have tried to recover it from someone else but have been unsuccessful after 6 months.
You choose the total amount of excess protection cover you want for a year, typically from £250 through to £2000. This aggregate amount of cover is then available for any claims you have in the year where you have paid an excess as part of your insurance claim.
If you are unfortunate to have several claims, you can claim more than once on your Excess Protection insurance policy but once you have been paid your total chosen limit, then there is no more cover.
Example:
You purchase £1000 of excess protection cover, and you have a claim where you have an excess of £350. You pay the £350 and you would be able to reclaim this from your excess protection policy, and still have £650 of cover remaining in the year if there were any other claims.
Yes, as with all insurance contracts there are some circumstances where the Excess cannot be reimbursed.
Your insurance company must deal with your claim and you will have paid the excess (or it has been deducted) as part of the claim settlement. You then have 90 days to submit a claim under your Excess Protection insurance policy.
Certain types of specific excesses may not be covered, such as windscreen/glass claims on a Motor Insurance policy.
If there is an identified person responsible for the claim then you must seek reimbursement of the excess from them for at least 6 months. If you have been unsuccessful then you may submit a claim under your Excess Protection insurance.
Please read the Policy Wording for full details of what is, and isn’t, covered.
Just send us an email to ‘claims@universalig.com’ confirming your name, address and policy number. We will reply to you with a claim form to capture the details we require, and you can send this back to us with evidence of your financial loss. Payment of valid claims will be made quickly and directly into your bank or building society account.
If you have a question about our products or our company, then please get in contact with us at ‘customer.services@universalig.com’.
We are an insurance company established in the Bailiwick of Guernsey in May 2014 and registered under company reference number 58416. The business is operated by an insurance manager who are Robus Risk Services (Guernsey) Ltd.
Insurance companies in the Bailiwick of Guernsey are regulated by the Guernsey Financial Services Commission (GFSC) and our reference number is 2257613. Universal Insurance are regulated under the Insurance Business Rules and Guidance, 2021 in accordance with the Insurance Business Law, 2002.
Guernsey and Jersey are the two Bailiwicks that form the Channel Islands, and both are self-governing British Crown dependencies but are not part of the UK.
We underwrite over 600,000 individual insurance policies in the UK each year.
We are regulated by the GFSC and always exceed their minimum capital requirements. To help provide customer confidence we have attained an AM Best Europe credit rating.
We are regulated under the Data Protection (Bailiwick of Guernsey) Law, 2017 which was introduced to protect the rights of individuals in relation to their personal data, and provide for the free movement of personal data, in a manner equivalent to and consistent with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU.
The Office of the Data Protection Authority (ODPA) in Guernsey – website: odpa.gg
We are registered with the OPDA as a Data Controller under reference number 12795.
We only use your data to underwrite your policy of insurance and to fulfil any claims that occur. For full details of how we use your data please refer to our Privacy Policy page.
Our data is kept on secure cloud based servers.
We only share the data with a third party if needed when issuing the policy of insurance or when required to deal with a claim. We ensure that any third party also has the relevant data protection measures in place to conform with current Data Protection laws.
IT Security and the protection of data is vitally important to us and therefore we use various measures from Firewalls to Encryption to ensure the safety of the data from cyber attacks.
