Analysis

Four Of The Five Insurers You Can Buy From Directly Now Sell The Same Thing, And Call It The Same Name

Source: The five direct insurers' own product pages

AA Life, Chubb Life, Southern Cross Life and nib all publish a product called Life & Living. Pinnacle is the outlier. A bundle is easier to buy than a menu, and much harder to compare.

By Henry Smith · Insurers · 2026-09-09

What this means for you If you are buying cover directly rather than through an adviser, you are increasingly choosing between five versions of one product shape rather than assembling cover from parts. That is a genuine convenience and it has a cost: when trauma is not sold as its own thing, you cannot line up one insurer's trauma definition against another's, and the definitions are where these policies actually differ.

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

There are five life insurers in New Zealand you can buy from without going near an adviser. We read all five of their own product pages on 9 September 2026 to see what they actually sell. The answer was more uniform than expected: four of the five publish a product called Life & Living, and one of those four does not underwrite it.

This is not a comparison of which is better, which we are in no position to judge and which depends on an underwriting decision that has not happened yet. It is a description of the shape of what is on offer.

The same name, four times

AA Life, Chubb Life, Southern Cross Life and nib all publish "Life & Living" or "Life and Living" on their own sites. Only Pinnacle Life does not.

nib is the plainest about what the phrase means. Its page frames the product as two halves and says so directly, offering to explain "the difference between Life and Living insurance", with Life paying out on death and Living paying out while you are alive but unable to work (nib, Life & Living Insurance, read 9 September 2026). The same page states that "nib nz limited issues and underwrites Life & Living Insurance products, and is solely responsible for claims".

Southern Cross Life is the most instructive of the four, because its product page shows a range collapsing into a single item in real time. It publishes exactly one product for sale: Southern Cross Life & Living Insurance, for "applications submitted from 20 November 2025 onwards". Directly beneath it sits Southern Cross Life Insurance, marked "This product is no longer on sale", with three archived policy wordings covering issues between 2016 and 19 November 2025 (Southern Cross Life, products, read 9 September 2026).

What that page also says, in the small print at the bottom, is worth more than the product list: "Southern Cross Life Insurance and Southern Cross Life & Living Insurance policies are underwritten and administered by Chubb Life Insurance New Zealand Limited (Chubb Life), who is responsible for the Calculate your cover tool, the Quote and application tool, as well as all claims, communications and other policy related matters."

So of the four companies selling a product called Life & Living, two of them are, at the level that matters, Chubb Life. Chubb sells it under its own name and underwrites Southern Cross's version of it. If you were comparing those two as independent options you were comparing one company with itself.

Chubb's own New Zealand life page is unusually candid about running two channels at once: it carries the direct Life & Living product and the adviser-distributed Assurance Extra range together (Chubb, life insurance New Zealand, read 9 September 2026). One company, two product families, and which one you are shown depends on how you arrived.

What the bundle contains

Southern Cross Life publishes its Life & Living contents in full, and the list is a useful picture of what this product shape is.

Life Cover pays a benefit of up to $1.5 million. A Terminal Illness Benefit pays the full life cover amount early on a diagnosis with a life expectancy under twelve months. A Bereavement Support Benefit pays up to $25,000 of the life cover amount early on death, for immediate costs such as funeral expenses. A Financial and Legal Advice Benefit reimburses up to $2,500 towards financial planning or legal advice about using money received from a claim. A Life Events Benefit allows an increase in cover on events such as having a baby without a further health assessment. A Policy Enhancement Benefit passes future improvements to the product through to existing policies. There is a thirty day cooling-off period with a full premium refund (Southern Cross Life, products, read 9 September 2026).

Read that list again and notice its shape. It is one cover with five things attached to it. None of the five is a separate product you could buy from someone else and compare.

Pinnacle is the outlier, and only partly

Pinnacle Life is the one company of the five that still publishes a menu. Its own product sitemap lists four pages: Life Insurance, Income Protection, Disability Cover and Critical Conditions Cover (Pinnacle Life, products, read 9 September 2026).

Except that two of the four are not standalone products. Pinnacle's own navigation labels Disability Cover and Critical Conditions Cover as "Life Insurance Add-on" (Pinnacle Life, disability cover, read 9 September 2026). So the menu is really two products and two attachments, which is a shorter distance from the Life & Living bundle than the page count suggests.

Pinnacle is also the only one of the five whose pages use the phrase "total and permanent", the standard New Zealand term for disablement cover.

What none of the five publishes

This is the part to state carefully, because absence on a website is not proof of absence in a product range. A company may write something over the phone, or under a name we did not search for, or in a document we did not open.

What we can say is what we found. Reading all five sites on 9 September 2026, none of them publishes:

mortgage protection or mortgage repayment cover
waiver of premium
family protection, meaning a benefit paid as an income rather than a lump sum
redundancy cover

Standalone total and permanent disablement cover appears on none of the five either, with Pinnacle's disability add-on the closest thing to it.

Every one of those is a common feature of the cover advisers place, so the gap between the two channels is real. But the honest way to say it is that these are not published on those sites on that date, not that the companies do not offer them. If you want one of them, ask directly rather than assuming from a marketing page, which is advice that applies to this article as much as to theirs.

The convergence is not a scandal. A single product with benefits attached is genuinely easier to buy, and for someone who would otherwise have no cover at all, easier to buy is not a small thing.

The cost is comparability, and it is structural rather than anyone's fault. Life cover is close to a commodity: a sum of money on death, and there is not much to argue about. Living cover is the opposite. Trauma and critical illness policies differ almost entirely in their definitions, which conditions are listed, how severe a heart attack has to be to qualify, whether early-stage cancers pay in full or partially. Those definitions are where the money is, and they are the thing a bundle makes hardest to see, because you cannot line up one insurer's trauma wording against another's when trauma is not sold as its own thing.

The other consequence is quieter. Four products called the same name, two of them underwritten by the same company, look to a shopper like four choices. Anyone comparing Chubb Life's Life & Living against Southern Cross Life's Life & Living is comparing two front doors to one underwriter.

What couldn't we check?

We did not read the policy wordings. Everything above is from product and marketing pages, which are summaries. The wording is the contract and is where every definition that matters actually lives, and a page saying a benefit exists tells you nothing about what triggers it.

We did not verify the negative list beyond those five sites on that one date. A site can be incomplete, a product can be sold by phone, and a page can be rewritten tomorrow. Treat that list as what we found published, not as what the companies sell.

AA Life's site is the hardest of the five to read, because its life insurance pages sit inside a much larger motoring and general insurance site, so terms like "business" appear on the page from unrelated navigation. We have not counted anything that we could not attribute to the life range specifically, which is why AA appears in this piece less than the others.

We have not spoken to any of the five. Nothing here reports how any of these products performs at claim time, which is the question that matters most and the one none of us can answer from a website.

QuoteHub is an adviser, so we have an interest in this comparison. We have tried to write it as a description of a product shape rather than an argument for our own channel, and the fairest summary is the one in the section above: a bundle is easier to buy and harder to compare, and which of those matters more depends on the person.

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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