Allianz website misleading over insurance

Allianz Australia's website contained misleading and deceptive statements about its travel insurance for six years, including that it covered people wherever they travelled.

It was more important to protect its bottom line than to stop misleading customers, the insurer admitted at the banking royal commission.

Most of the problems followed a December 2015 website upgrade but the inquiry on Monday heard some of the incorrect travel insurance statements were on the site for six years.

Allianz finally took down its offending website pages in June and reported breaches of financial services laws to the regulator.

Allianz has not contacted customers about the issues but is working to determine the number of people involved and to provide refunds.

Allianz was contravening financial services laws every day the website's misleading and deceptive statements remained accessible to the public, the inquiry heard.

Allianz executive Michael Winter agreed the company did not care enough or take the matter seriously enough to fix the website.

Senior counsel assisting the commission Rowena Orr QC said that was because taking down the website would have cost the business money and at Allianz it was more important to protect the bottom line than to stop misleading customers.

Mr Winter, the chief general manager of retail distribution at Allianz Australia, said he did not think it was more important to protect the bottom line.

"I think it should absolutely be more important to protect the customer," he said.

But Mr Winter then agreed that, in this instance, the sequence of events demonstrated it was more important at Allianz to protect the bottom line than to stop misleading customers.

One of the website claims from 2012 was that Allianz's comprehensive travel insurance covered "wherever you're travelling, whatever your needs", despite the policy excluding areas for which DFAT had issued travel warnings.

It also claimed overseas medical assistance was unlimited when that was not the case.

Mr Winter said Allianz had not had a process of a regular ongoing review of website content.

There were also failings in document compliance and monitoring and the supervision of agents, he said.

The royal commission heard the travel issues were among 120 unique errors on its website, also affecting home insurance.

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