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How we're helping our customers during COVID-19

Our purpose is to make your world a safer place. That starts with our people, our customers and our community. IAG has a range of measures in place to respond to the evolving COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic to support our customers, employees, partners and the broader community.

Updated 5 August 2020

This is a difficult and uncertain time as COVID-19 continues to impact our communities. We have a range of measures in place to continue to protect our people, customers and the wider community, and this will continue to be based on the latest health and safety advice.  

Customer support initiatives

We have extended our Help Program and COVID-19 customer support measures until the end of the year to continue to help customers experiencing financial hardship.

The measures available to NRMA Insurance, CGU, SGIO, SGIC, and WFI home, motor and small business insurance customers experiencing financial hardship due to COVID-19 have been extended until 31 December 2020.

To date IAG has made changes to more than 80,000 policies (across all brands) to help customers through the pandemic.

The measures are designed to suit the unique situation of individual customers and include:

  • Access to premium reductions
  • Premium deferrals of up to three months for home and motor insurance customers, and for up to six months for small business insurance customers
  • The option to change premium payments from annual to pay by the month instalments for no additional cost
  • Reduced or waived excess amounts in the event of a claim
  • Waived cancellation and administration fees for customers who cancel their policies, including refunds on the unused proportions of premiums
  • Travel insurance refunds where customers are unable to travel due to COVID-19 restrictions, and have not yet travelled or made a claim

We will continue to monitor the evolving situation and will assess the measures again towards the end of the year to ensure we continue to provide the appropriate support to customers through the pandemic.

Read about these measures in our announcement.

Financial hardship

We understand that our customers may be experiencing financial hardship right now due to impacts of COVID-19. In addition to the specific measures that we’ve announced, our customer service team can provide our customers with different options to help them with their current situation.

We encourage our customers who may be facing hardship to contact us to discuss their options:

Customer counselling

Our customers are able access a free and confidential phone counselling service provided by an independent psychological services organisation engaged by IAG, called Assure.

These services are delivered by a qualified team of psychologists with experience in specialised counselling and post incident support.

To access this offer and for further details, our customers can call us or contact us online through our brand websites.

Travel insurance customers

IAG provides travel insurance policies under our NRMA Insurance, CGU, SGIO and SGIC brands.

We have updated our travel insurance to reflect the latest Government advice on both international and domestic travel. We encourage customers to visit the Smart Traveller website for the latest advice.

Customers who have purchased a travel insurance policy under one of our brands should visit our websites or contact us to ensure they understand their policy and what coverage they have. This will depend on the policy, when it was purchased and their intended travel date.

To help customers whose travel has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, we are currently offering refunds on insurance premiums for travel insurance policies under our CGU, NRMA Insurance, SGIO and SGIC brands.

For information on eligibility or to request a refund, customers should visit:

Landlord's insurance customers

We provide landlord's insurance through our NRMA Insurance, WFI, CGU, SGIO and SGIC brands.

We understand this is a difficult time for many landlords and tenants. Due to the unprecedented circumstances of COVID-19 we have introduced the following changes to help our residential landlord insurance customers and their tenants:

  • Landlords are currently only required to provide proof of financial loss, rather than a tenant eviction notice or intent to re-let, when lodging a rent default claim.
  • We will not pursue the recovery of rent from tenants that are experiencing financial hardship when processing rent default claims.
  • If landlords are receiving reduced rent because of COVID-19, we encourage them to contact our claims teams to discuss their individual circumstances and the options that may be available to them.

Assessing claims

To protect our people and our customers we are increasing the use of our virtual assessing processes – for example using a live video assessment. This has been designed to minimise face-to-face interaction for customers who have made claims. Our assessors will be contacting customers to arrange virtual assessments.

If we’re unable to provide our virtual assessing services, we will be asking our assessors and customers appropriate screening questions before our people visit customers.

Our assessors will also use appropriate Personal Protective Equipment and follow the appropriate health and safety advice of authorities.

Broker support package

In addition to supporting our customers, we have introduced a number of initiatives to help our broker partners during the COVID-19 pandemic, including:

  • Free counselling services via Assure
  • Access to Lifeline Accidental Counsellor training programs
  • Professional development (including a webinar series with National Insurance Brokers Association to provide Continuing Professional Development accredited learning and development opportunities for insurance brokers Australia-wide)
  • Digital marketing campaign support with digital agency, OneAffiniti
  • A CGU speaker webinar series exclusively for broker partners

Read more in our announcement.

Poncho Insurance discounts

Poncho Insurance offers customers a monthly car insurance policy, with an easy monthly charge and no cancellation fees, similar to a monthly subscription. This gives us the ability to adapt flexibly to our customer needs.

In response to COVID-19, Poncho is temporarily reducing monthly premiums by 30% for new and existing customers for car insurance.

For more information visit: ponchoinsurance.com.au/covid-19

For specific information on how our brands are responding to COVID-19 visit:

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