Econet issues press release on the Ecolife agreement termination with Trustco

Today, Econet issued a press release to reassure customers they are not going to lose their Ecolife cover and that there’ll have another system running in place of the Trustco Mobile one whose agreement was terminated. The release doesn’t say much that Econet hasn’t already said in its public notices since Monday.

The sum of the release is ‘Ecolife is down but don’t worry, we’re on top of the situation.’ In short, it left us non-the-wiser of what really happened or what exactly Econet is doing about it. Here’s the full text of the release:

Econet Wireless has announced that Trustco Mobile, the foreign technical partner in Ecolife, has unilaterally terminated its joint-venture agreement signed with Econet in October 2010 to provide life insurance cover through Ecolife.

However, customers will not be adversely affected after Econet took appropriate measures that will ensure that the existing live cover of Ecolife customers is secured.

The security of our customers was always a key consideration during development of this product. Structures are therefore in place to ensure Ecolife customers remain covered.

In response to the termination of the agreement, the following structures are in place:

a)        A contingent fund, underwritten by First Mutual Life, to cover all policyholders who are entitled to cover;

b)        Appropriate technical solutions that ensure continuity of the product.

Econet Wireless commits to ensuring that policyholders are not prejudiced and that all claims will be honoured as and when they fall due in line with the terms and conditions of the product.

While the new platform is being integrated into the system, we will not be able to update customers’ usage statistics automatically. However, we are capturing all usage statistics, and we will be able to process any claims manually.

Econet is prepared to take such further steps as may be necessary to secure the interests of its customers.