Decision

If Foundation Life owed you money, it is now at Inland Revenue and there is no deadline to claim it

Source: Foundation Life, News and announcements

Foundation Life cancelled every whole-of-life and endowment policy, the old savings-style life cover, and paid out the cash inside them. Anyone who did not return their paperwork by 30 June 2026 had their payment handed to Inland Revenue instead. Inland Revenue has published no closing date for claiming it back.

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.

Written by Henry Smith · Reviewed by Smiths Insurance & KiwiSaver, licensed Financial Advice Provider (FSP712931)

If you or someone in your family held an old Foundation Life savings-style life policy and never sent the paperwork back, the money owing on it is not gone. It is sitting at Inland Revenue, and no deadline has been published for claiming it.

Foundation Life cancelled every whole-of-life and endowment policy it had on 1 September 2025. Those are the old-fashioned contracts: life cover with a savings pot inside. Cancelling them left cash owing to each holder, collectable by returning a form, and the final date for that was 30 June 2026. Payments nobody claimed were transferred to Inland Revenue as unclaimed money, which Foundation Life announced as finished on 1 July 2026. It then closed its office on 15 July and switched off its 0800 line on 24 July, leaving an email address only (Foundation Life, 24 July 2026).

How to check whether money is waiting

Inland Revenue runs a public unclaimed money search. Its pages explain how to look up a name and lodge a claim, and no closing date is attached to either (Inland Revenue).

That is where the claim goes now, not to the insurer. Two groups are most likely to be owed something without knowing it. Whole-of-life and endowment policies are decades old, so the address on file is often decades old too. And where the policyholder has since died, the money may be owed to an estate or a relative who never knew the policy existed.

If you had a term policy, nothing was cancelled

Term life is the plain kind: cover for a set number of years, no savings pot. Foundation Life's term policies, and every claim still being settled, moved to Chubb Life under a transfer approved by the Reserve Bank, with the contract wording and the cover unchanged (Foundation Life). No date for it was ever published.

What a transfer like that changes is who owes you the money, so the new insurer's strength becomes the live question. The Reserve Bank's register lists Chubb Life Insurance New Zealand with an A.M. Best rating of A, A.M. Best being a ratings agency that grades how able an insurer is to pay claims (RBNZ register, archived 20 August 2026). The register is the place to check that, rather than the reassuring line in the letter. Our financial strength tool tracks those disclosures in one place.

The wind-up, dated

Nobody published this timetable. Every row is sourced, all.

Date	What happened	Source
2 July 2025	High Court approves the wind-up scheme	Foundation Life
1 September 2025	Whole-of-life and endowment policies cancelled	Foundation Life
13 October 2025	The public is told, 42 days later	Foundation Life
4 May 2026	Reserve Bank cancels the licence, at the company's request	RBNZ register
30 June 2026	Final paperwork deadline	Foundation Life
1 July 2026	Unclaimed payments to Inland Revenue announced complete	Foundation Life
24 July 2026	0800 line dead, email only; all cash payments confirmed complete	Foundation Life

The claim window ran 302 days, cancellation to final deadline, or 260 if you count from the day the public was told. One oddity in the order: the licence went before the money did, cancelled 51 days before the last unclaimed payments moved. That sounds worse than it is, because by May the risk had either gone to Chubb Life or turned into cash owing, so there was no insurance business left to license.

Residents whose policies were cancelled could take a replacement policy with Chubb Life, cash, or a mix of the two. People living overseas got cash only, in the same 13 October 2025 scheme update the table above cites.

Are other insurers leaving too?

Yes, slowly, and you can count them. The Reserve Bank's public register listed 81 licensed insurers in its 15 January 2026 version (RBNZ register as archived 27 February 2026) and 79 in the version updated 10 August 2026, read in the 20 August capture cited above. 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 the 79 sell life cover to the public. Fifteen have "Life" in the registered name, three of those are reinsurers that cover insurers rather than people, which leaves twelve, plus 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).

Insurers leaving is not rare. The Reserve Bank's list of cancelled licences runs to 55 companies, six of them since March 2025, among them nib New Zealand Insurance and Marac Insurance (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 does this mean for me?

If your insurer exits, the likeliest outcome is that nothing about your cover changes. Foundation Life's term policyholders kept the same contract with a new name on it, and open claims carried on being settled. Through all of it, the risk people were actually exposed to was not financial. The court process and the Reserve Bank sign-off kept cover and claims intact. What none of that machinery can do is find you.

The exposure is administrative, and it lands on one group hardest: holders of very old policies, often finished and forgotten, at addresses that have long since changed. A 302-day window closes whether or not you noticed it open.

So for anyone holding life insurance with an insurer that has stopped taking new customers, been sold, or gone quiet, the cheapest protection is boring: current contact details with the insurer and opened mail, even on a policy you finished paying years ago. And where an exit hands over a replacement policy rather than cash, that replacement is a new contract rather than the old one continued, which makes it worth weighing against the open market. Our compare insurers tool is one way to do that.

What could we 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). It never published how much money ended up at Inland Revenue, how many policyholders it had at the end, or the date of the transfer to Chubb Life. RNZ's coverage blocked us with a 403 as well, NBR's sits behind a paywall, and we did not read the 27 scheme documents on Foundation Life's Scheme of Arrangement page. So apart from those two totals, this piece carries no policyholder counts and no dollar amounts, and none should be read into it.

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.

What this means for your cover

Financial strength, published benefit limits and who underwrites which brand, side by side. Compare New Zealand insurers

Sources

Every source below was read and checked on 21 August 2026.

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