A Case of Unpaid R & B Insurance Premium

This is again a first-hand information about how to make a claim against a robbery and burglary (R & B) insurance cover of a café. I was the non-life insurance agent of the company against which the claim was filed. What is odd in this case that I will describe is that the insurance premium is not yet paid by the café owner when the robbery occurred.

The insurance deal was also the first I closed as a free-lance agent of a prestigious non-life insurance company. The café owner asked me for a quote on a P0.5M insurance cover against robbery and burglary of his computer equipment and accessories on a mid-week. I immediately gave the quote and the owner accepted it on a Friday noon. I, then, immediately called our office to prepare the insurance policy.

The next day being a Saturday and a non-working day for the company, I was unable to get the policy and so likewise failed to present it to the insured. The next working day, a Monday, I intentionally did not make a move to show the policy to the café owner and collect the premium because of Filipino business tradition not to collect nor pay any deal on such a day.

While the above flow of events would seem normal on a Philippine business deal, an untoward event happened in the early Tuesday morning. The café was robbed of its computer equipment (CPUs and LCD monitors) worth about P200,000. I got the bad news in a phone call by the café owner at around 8:00 AM of that Tuesday.

Being a novice health insurance attorneys agent, I took the efforts of asking some friends who know about insurance claims and was told that the fate of the deal will depend on how the branch manager of my insurance company would decide. My next move is logically to tell the truth of the deal with the branch manager who decided and instructed me to collect the payment of the insurance premium of a little more than P4,000 from the insured and that they should file the claim together with the police report as soon as possible.

To make the long story short, the insured café owner got paid with the amount of around P145,000 two (2) months after the claim is filed. In my next installment on this series of articles about insurance, I will discuss what are the documents needed when making claim against an R & B insurance cover.