Paul Avis: A short guide to group risk - critical illness

Group critical illness (GCI) provides a one off, lump-sum payment to an employee once they are diagnosed with and survive a serious condition - usually for 14 days. With only 3,311 employers having the cover in 2016, the market did grow by 7.3% and now covers 586,275 people. There are two formats of the benefit - employer-paid, which attracts a P11d/benefit in kind charge, and employee-paid. Some organisations will provide a core benefit amount and then an employee ‘tops up' using an online/voluntary or flexible benefit platform approach. The latter employee-paid options represent 65%...