Frequently Asked Questions

The Package calculation is based on the amount of your Original Settlement with Southern Response.

If you did not receive any payment from Southern Response for the repair or rebuild of your residential dwelling house, then the cost to remediate any earthquake damage to your dwelling house will have been covered by the Earthquake Commission. In this case, your Package offer is based on the amount of your Original Settlement with Southern Response for your out-of-scope (OOS) items only.

Any settlement with Southern Response for repair or replacement of OOS items that included a payment for earthquake damage to a residential dwelling house is an over-cap settlement (see information here).

No, anyone who has received an over-cap Package payment will have had allowances for the OOS elements of their Original Settlement calculated as part of the Package settlement, so will not be eligible for any further payment.

Any Package payment will need to be settled with the same parties that Southern Response originally settled with. You and your former partner will need to agree how any Package payment is to be shared between you.  Southern Response can give effect to this, including by splitting the Payment into different bank accounts if required.

For most OOS settlements, professional fees will only be included in a Package offer if the original OOS claim was for earthquake damage to property items that would (at the time of the Original Settlement) have required the services of engineers or other professional consultants to complete a Code compliant repair. The types of OOS property repairs that might satisfy these criteria include, for example, the full replacement of a concrete swimming pool where building consent and engineering services would have been required to complete this work.

This differs to over-cap claims, where professional fees are included in Southern Response's Package offers in the majority of cases, because professional fees would almost always be incurred in the repair or rebuild of a house.

If you have received a Package offer from Southern Response and have concerns about how it has been calculated, you may request a review of your offer within 20 working days of receiving it.

You can request a review of the offer if you have any concerns about:

• how the Package principles have been applied to the policyholder's original cash settlement with Southern Response, and/or
• how the Package offer has been calculated.

Complaints about the scope of the Package or any other aspect of Package design are unable to be considered under the Package Review Process.

For more information about the Package Review Process, please click here.

APLY ID is a New Zealand founded company designed to allow customer ID verification on a secure platform. It is used by many of New Zealand's largest businesses.

Once a customer has completed their ID verification, APLY ID will run some background checks on the provided document/s. It is checking the document is verified with the appropriate agency (eg. Department of Internal Affairs or NZ Transport Authority) and that all the details are correct. The system will also complete a biometrics check to measure the customer's face and match it to the photo on their ID. 

APLY ID uses world leading security technology to ensure customers' information is kept safe. All of the customers details are kept in the secure platform and no details are saved to any device. Once the ID verification has been completed, the report is permanently archived. APLY ID and Southern Response will never be able to access this information again. 

APLY ID is our preferred way to verify customers as it is fast and secure, however, if a customer does not wish to be verified via APLY ID they can do a manual ID verification instead.

This package broadly covers Southern Response cash settled insurance claims.

The AMI policies included in the Package are:

• Premier House Policy
• Premier Rental Property Policy
• Market Value House Policy
• Market Value Rental Property Policy

The Package is focused on cash settlements prior to 1 October 2014 because most policyholders who cash settled with Southern Response after October 2014 have received a contingency sum already (and professional fees where applicable). 

The Government has established an Independent Oversight Committee (IOC) to supervise the rollout of the Package.

For more information about the IOC, please click here.

It will be necessary to make deductions in some circumstances to ensure the same costs are not paid twice, and to ensure any payment is within the parameters of your insurance policy. For example, deuctions may be made because:

• previous payments have been made by Southern Response, either as part of the Original Settlement or since then. (In these cases, previous payments will be
  deducted.)

• the property involved was shared property such as a shared fence or driveway.

• the Original Settlement involved an insurance policy capped at a stated sum insured limit. (In these cases, the Professional Fees Amount (if applicable) and the Contingency Amount will be reduced if necessary so as not to exceed the applicable sum insured limit.)