Decision

Foundation Life policyholders had 302 days to claim before their money went to Inland Revenue

Source: Foundation Life, News and announcements

Foundation Life cancelled every whole-of-life and endowment policy, the old savings-style life cover, on 1 September 2025. Holders then had until 30 June 2026 to send back their paperwork. Money left unclaimed went to Inland Revenue on 1 July 2026, and 23 days later Foundation Life switched off its 0800 line.

By Henry Smith · Insurers · 2026-08-20

What this means for you Foundation Life gave its whole-of-life and endowment customers 302 days to send back paperwork before the cash owing to them was handed to Inland Revenue. Anyone who missed the date can still claim it there, and no deadline has been published. Term life customers and open claims moved to Chubb Life on the same contract terms.

Foundation Life has left New Zealand. If you held one of its old savings-style life policies, you had 302 days to return a form. Miss it and your money went to Inland Revenue.

Foundation Life cancelled every whole-of-life and endowment policy on 1 September 2025. Those are the old-fashioned kind: life cover with a savings pot inside it. Cancelling them left cash owing to each holder. To collect it you had to send paperwork back by 30 June 2026.

Then the lights went off. Twenty-three days after it announced the Inland Revenue transfer was finished, the 0800 number stopped working. The office had already closed (Foundation Life, 24 July 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026).

Nobody publishes a guide to what an insurer's exit looks like from your side of the policy. Here it is, dated.

What did Foundation Life actually say?

The last notice on its news page, dated 24 July 2026, reads: "Where completed requirements documentation was not received by 30 June 2026, the associated cash payment has been transferred to the Inland Revenue Department as unclaimed money in accordance with the Unclaimed Money Act 1971" (Foundation Life, retrieved 20 August 2026).

In plain terms: no form, no payment, go and ask Inland Revenue.

The exit ran through a scheme of arrangement: a High Court supervised deal that binds every affected policyholder once a judge signs it off. The court approved this one on 2 July 2025 (Foundation Life, 19 August 2025, retrieved 20 August 2026).

The scheme "was successfully implemented on 1 September 2025". Residents who qualified could take a replacement policy with Chubb Life, cash, or a mix of the two. People living overseas got cash only (Foundation Life, 13 October 2025, retrieved 20 August 2026).

Term policies took a different route. Term life is the plain kind: cover for a set number of years, no savings pot. Those, plus any claim still being settled, moved to another insurer. Foundation Life's wording: "All Whole of Life and Endowment unsettled claims and Term policies have been transferred to Chubb Life via an IPSA s44 Transfer process approved by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand" (Foundation Life, retrieved 20 August 2026).

Translated: IPSA is the Insurance (Prudential Supervision) Act 2010, the law that governs insurers here. Section 44 of that Act lets one licensed insurer hand policies to another, with the Reserve Bank's written approval and your contract terms untouched. No date was published for the transfer.

An insurer needs a Reserve Bank licence to sell cover here, and Foundation Life asked for its own to be cancelled. The register records it: "At the request of Foundation Life (NZ) Limited, the licence issued to it on 26th August 2013 under section 19 of the Act was cancelled on 4th of May 2026 pursuant to section 30(1) of the Act" (RBNZ register, archived 20 August 2026). Section 30(1) is the voluntary door: the insurer asks to leave.

How long did the whole thing take?

Nobody published this table. Every row is sourced, all retrieved 20 August 2026.

Date	What happened	Source
2 July 2025	High Court approves the scheme	Foundation Life
1 September 2025	Scheme takes effect; whole-of-life and endowment policies cancelled	Foundation Life
13 October 2025	The public is told, 42 days later	Foundation Life
Undated	Term policies and open claims move to Chubb Life	Foundation Life
4 May 2026	Reserve Bank cancels the licence, at the company's request	RBNZ register
31 May 2026	Earlier paperwork date, missed by some	Foundation Life
24 June 2026	Transfers to Inland Revenue start for customers who never replied	Foundation Life
30 June 2026	Final paperwork deadline	Foundation Life
1 July 2026	Unclaimed payments to Inland Revenue announced complete	Foundation Life
15 July 2026	Office closed; 0800 line to run until 24 July	Foundation Life
24 July 2026	0800 line dead, email only; all cash payments confirmed complete	Foundation Life

The clock that mattered ran from 1 September 2025 to 30 June 2026: 302 days, a shade under ten months.

The public only found out on 13 October 2025, though. Count from there and the window shrinks to 260 days. The full wind-down, court approval to dead phones, took 387 days.

One bit of the order matters: the licence went before the money did. The Reserve Bank cancelled it on 4 May 2026 (RBNZ register, archived 20 August 2026). Transfers to Inland Revenue did not begin for another 51 days.

So for that stretch the company was chasing forms with no insurance licence. Its 10 June 2026 notice says some customers still had not returned documents "despite numerous follow ups", after an earlier 31 May date (Foundation Life, 10 June 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026). That is less alarming than it sounds: by May the risk sat with Chubb Life or had become cash owing, so there was no insurance business left to license.

Are other insurers leaving too?

Yes, and you can count them. The Reserve Bank keeps a public register of every licensed insurer. Its 15 January 2026 version listed 81, Foundation Life among them (RBNZ register as archived 27 February 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026).

The version updated 10 August 2026 lists 79 (RBNZ register, archived 20 August 2026). We compared the two lists name by name. Nobody joined. Exactly two left: Foundation Life on 4 May 2026 and Manawa Energy Insurance on 8 July 2026.

Only a slice of them sell life cover, and that slice is thinner than 79 makes it sound (RBNZ register, archived 20 August 2026):

Number	Who they are
79	Licensed insurers on the register
15	Have "Life" in their registered name
3	Of the 15, reinsurers: they cover insurers, not people
12	Life-named companies left that sell to the public

Add AIA New Zealand, which sells life cover without the word in its name. Two of the twelve are Resolution Life companies that plan to move every New Zealand policy to Asteron Life in 2027, trading as Acenda Life (Resolution Life, retrieved 20 August 2026).

Insurers leaving is not rare. The Reserve Bank's list of cancelled licences runs to 55 companies, six of them since March 2025: New Zealand Dental Insurance Society, First Insurance, Marac Insurance, nib New Zealand Insurance, Foundation Life and Manawa Energy (RBNZ cancelled insurance licences, archived 20 August 2026). Every one with a published notice left voluntarily. What makes Foundation Life unusual is not that it left, but that it left a complete public timetable behind.

What happens to my policy if my insurer leaves?

Foundation Life is a worked example. The answer depends on which of two routes your policy takes.

Route one: your policy moves to another insurer

This is what happened to Foundation's term policyholders and anyone with a claim still open. Your contract carries across unchanged: same wording, same cover. What changes is who owes you the money.

So the new insurer's strength becomes your question. Foundation's policies went to Chubb Life Insurance New Zealand, which the Reserve Bank's register shows with an A.M. Best rating of A (RBNZ register, archived 20 August 2026). A.M. Best is a ratings agency grading how able an insurer is to pay claims. Check the register, not the reassuring line in the letter. Our financial strength tool tracks the disclosures in one place.

Route two: your policy is cancelled and you get paid out

Now you are a decision-maker on a deadline. The danger is not the insurer running off with your money: the court, the Reserve Bank and section 44 kept cover and claims protected throughout.

The danger is paperwork. An old address. A letter nobody opened. A form nobody sent back. And a 302-day window that closes whether or not you noticed it open. Whole-of-life and endowment policies are decades old, exactly where contact details go stale.

If you hold life insurance with an insurer that has stopped taking new customers or announced a sale, the cheapest protection is boring: current contact details and opened mail, even on a policy you finished paying years ago. If an exit hands you a replacement offer, compare insurers against the open market first.

If you already missed the deadline

Your money is not gone. It sits with Inland Revenue, whose unclaimed money pages explain how to search and claim, with no published deadline (Inland Revenue, retrieved 20 August 2026). Claim there, not through Foundation Life, which since 24 July 2026 answers email only (Foundation Life, 24 July 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026).

What we could not check

The Reserve Bank's website blocked every direct request we made on 20 August 2026 with a 403 error. So every Reserve Bank figure here comes from Internet Archive copies: a 27 February 2026 capture of the register's 15 January 2026 version, plus captures of the register and the cancelled licences page that we triggered on 20 August 2026.

The register's notice for Foundation Life cites "the Insurance (Prudential Supervision) Act 2020". The Act is dated 2010, as the same page's Manawa Energy notice correctly states. We treat that as a typing error by the Bank.

Foundation Life's 29 April 2026 update reported over 13,000 cash payments totalling over $230 million, which it called 86% of all the cash the scheme had to pay (Foundation Life, 29 April 2026, retrieved 20 August 2026). It never published how much money ended up at Inland Revenue, how many policyholders it had at the end, or the date of the section 44 transfer to Chubb Life.

RNZ's coverage blocked us with a 403 too, and NBR's sits behind a paywall. So apart from those two totals, this piece has no policyholder counts and no dollar amounts. None should be read into it. We also did not read the 27 scheme documents on Foundation Life's Scheme of Arrangement page, 18 High Court filings and the Explanatory Statement among them.

Finally, the register does not sort insurers by what they sell. Our count of twelve is a count of registered names. It misses at least AIA New Zealand, and it includes closed books: companies that still service old policies but sell nothing new.

Sources

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