Why You Need to Keep Your Contact Details Up to Date

When you take out a life insurance policy with us or make an investment, there are some steps that you agree for us to take to ensure that the benefits will reach you or your beneficiary. These are detailed below, in accordance with the Association for Savings and Investment South Africa’s (ASISA’s) Standard on Unclaimed Assets as available at www.asisa.org.za. These steps will be followed in our attempt to process your claim, or pay you or your beneficiaries, in the event that your policy or investment has matured or in the event of your death.

1. We will first try to contact you or your beneficiaries using the contact details that you provided us with. This includes historical records and records held by different divisions in the Sanlam group.
2. If we are unable to reach you, we will try to obtain your or your beneficiaries’ most recent contact details from external information providers (e.g. the Department of Home Affairs or a credit bureau).
3. After a reasonable period of time has passed, but no longer than three years, during which all reasonable steps have been taken to contact you or your beneficiaries, the assets would be identified as ‘unclaimed’.
4. If we need to appoint an external tracing company to locate you or your beneficiaries, tracing fees may apply and may be deducted from the benefit payout. These costs will depend on the tracing activities involved and may change over time.

Any unclaimed assets will earn growth according to our practice.

About Unclaimed Assets at Glacier by Sanlam

What happens if a benefit is not claimed after an investment becomes payable?

Glacier will take all necessary steps mentioned before, to contact you or your beneficiary when a benefit becomes payable.

If you or the beneficiary are unresponsive, we will assume that the contact details have changed and we will take all reasonable steps, to locate you or the beneficiary. If all reasonable tracing efforts have been exhausted and contact has not been made, the investment will be categorised as “unclaimed”. This does not mean we can then take ownership of the assets.

What happens with the unclaimed benefits at Glacier while the beneficiary is being traced?

The benefit amount will stay invested in the original investment product. All interest and dividends earned on the investment will be reinvested in the original investment product.

What if the regular income amount is returned from the bank?

We will communicate with you on the relevant date. If you are unresponsive and we determine that your contact details have changed, the income will remain in an interest-bearing cash investment fund. Furthermore, we will take all steps that may be reasonably expected to locate you, according to ASISA’s Standard on Unclaimed Assets.