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Available with immediate effect, Zurich is offering intermediaries and their clients the option to select critical illness at a lower level than the life cover also offered within Zurich’s protection plan.

This should allow customers with limited budgets to protect their mortgage against the risk of death while retaining some element of critical illness cover.

Zurich has also repriced its term assurance and critical illness cover and integrated its income protection benefit so it can be selected alongside life cover, life and critical illness cover and stand-alone critical illness cover.

According to the company, when purchased with either of the critical illness benefits the cost of the integrated income protection is up to 30 per cent cheaper than when purchased with life cover.

Zurich has also increased its non-medical underwriting limits to ease the underwriting process and speed up the issue time and the maximum sum assured for critical illness cover for both personal and business cover has been increased to £1.5m and £2m respectively.

Peter Hamilton, Zurich UK Life's protection management director, said: "Since the launch of our interactive underwriting service at the turn of the year, we've been delighted with the increased volume of protection business coming through to us and we'd like to thank intermediaries for the support they've given us.

"We’re on a journey of continuous improvement - we hope this latest range of changes demonstrates that."

Zurich is also offering customers free cover for Whole Life plans being used for IHT mitigation purposes. This facility ensures that if the customer was to die during the free cover period, a cash sum of up to £1m would be paid out.

Should a customer undergo a change of health whilst the original application is being processed, the plan will be put in place without any change to the original terms.

Hamilton added: "Mortgage and family protection are currently the most challenging areas of business for many advisers, which we are keen to support with these latest enhancements.

"In particular, we have focused our price-sharpening on our integrated income protection benefit and we hope intermediaries will find this an attractive alternative to stand-alone IP, especially where budgets are tight."