Endowment Policies

Your policy may cover you, your partner, both of you, or your children depending on the type of endowment you bought and what was specified when the policy was taken out. Cover for you and your partner is known as ‘joint life’ cover.

Please check your policy schedule to see who is covered. For joint life policies, we will only pay out one lump sum if either person dies within the term of the policy. Cover will then stop, so the second person will no longer be covered, and there will be no lump sum payable on maturity.

We'll pay a fair value based on the premiums you've paid, plus any investment return we've achieved, less any expenses we've incurred.

If you decide to surrender your policy, you should think about whether you have sufficient life cover to meet your needs. You can contact our Customer Contact Centre on 0345 605 7777 for details of any existing policies you may hold with us.

If you wish to discuss if the level of cover you have is suitable, we recommend that you seek advice from your financial adviser. If you don’t have one, you can use our Find a Financial Adviser tool to find one in your area.

It's possible to stop paying the premiums into your Endowment policy, but this will reduce the value of your policy and any life cover. This means we'll pay less money when the policy ends than if you had continued to pay the premiums.

You may have bought Income Benefit cover with your Endowment Policy. This may have been optional or it could have been automatically built in to the endowment you bought. This benefit provides an additional payout of a regular income if a person covered by the policy dies.

The income will be paid up to the end of the Income Benefit policy term and this could be a different term to that of your Endowment policy. The regular income can usually be converted to a lump sum. We'll let you know if this is possible at the time of claim.

The Income Benefit part of your policy does not have an investment element and so there is no surrender value. Please check your original paperwork for details of the full benefits on your Endowment policy. If you have any questions, please call our Customer Contact Centre.

The endowment policy you chose may benefit from additional periodical payments throughout your policy term. Check your original documentation for details of these payments. We'll contact you when we are due to make these payments.

Many different types of endowments have been sold over the years. Please check your original policy documents for other product(s) features that may apply to your policy.

We supplied a contract for the product(s) to you when you bought the policy. You should refer to this and any contract endorsement which we may have sent you for full information. In the event of conflict between this guide and any contract, the contract will prevail.