The next time you want to subscribe unto any insurance policy, it will be in your own interest to be extra vigilant, or better still seek counseling , as it has emerged that, one of the giant insurance companies in the country, have devised means that sought to ‘milk’ ‘illiterate’ market women huge sums of cash.
One of such companies is Vanguard Assurance, who has been accused by several market women from the Odorna market, for deducting some amount of cash from their personal bank accounts without their consent.
The ‘strategy’ is such that most market women are unable to read, finds it hard to comprehend insurance policies and ‘hidden’ clauses that goes with them, however, insurance agents who only sought to reach targets and raise enough income for themselves use the opportunity to coax the market women to subscribe unto preferred convincing policies that are able to easily drag the market women unto the policy, the Free Press has gathered.
‘’when they came to register us, we reached a conclusion where they were supposed to come to us monthly to collect GHc50 , but on the contrary, we realized that they rather took the monies from our banks and it is even more than twice of the agreed amount”, the market women lamented.
According to them (names withheld), the insurance company although was still taking Ghc50 from them monthly at the market centres, an amount of GHc101 was also being deducted from their banks each month, a condition they never subscribed to.
However, when Free Press Scouts visited Vanguard Assurance Head Office in Accra, top notches of the company explained that it was even contrary to their policies to deduct monies from clients, especially market women, who engaged in micro insurance policies.
In an interview with one Mr. Quarshie, Operations Manager of the company, Mr. Yusif Adamu, a distribution officer, and Dzifa Nyamede, Head of Legal and Compliance, it appeared quite shocking and absurd, why such deductions were made from their client’s bank accounts.
‘’we have a micro-policy with market women where it does not require monies to be deducted from their accounts, we take it directly from them at their market centres, so this comes to us as a surprise, and we are surely going to look into this’’, they assured.
Interestingly, as at the time of filing this story, the insurance company had summoned all the aggrieved market women, and refunded all ‘illegal’ deductions.
More interesting details soon.
Source: FREE PRESS