Singapore facilitates revocable beneficiaries nominations
Restrictions on who may recieve payouts under a life or certain other types of policy are to be eased to make it possible to re-assign policies under which beneficiaries have been nominated.
The changes in the law, which await the President's signature, will mean that the previous ban on assigning benefits will be eased and in some cases lifted altogether.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) says that the previous policy has caused hardship in a number of cases.
Although no-one is saying why the total ban was imposed, it is possible that it was to make sure that wives and families were not abandoned without hope of support in the case of divorce.
But with changes in Family Law, the independence of women and near-full employment Singapore is a very different society to that of many years ago.
The hardships have included where it would be just for the policy to be reassigned following a divorce, where the policyholder is ill and needs to access the funds in the policy for emergency purposes or where they have nominated beneficiaries from classes that are not specified within the law e.g. grandparents, brothers and sisters and even parents. Under the law as it stands, only spouses and parents are permitted. This has led to arguments in probate where spouses or children have challenged claims by other relatives where the nomination was not backed up by a specific bequest in the will.
Also included in the new laws are accident and dread disease policies.
The concept of revocable nomination is, then, to allow changes in the revocation to take account of changing circumstances.
But there is a second option: that of irrevocable nomination. This, in principle similar to the existing position, means that an assignment of benefits cannot be undone - even to re-assign the benefits to the policyholder personally.
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