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The benefits payable under long term or life assurance policies may be linked to the value of specific assets. These assets are usually, but not invariably, investment funds or unit trusts. The insurance policy may be expressed as linked to the value of or return on a specific number of units in the fund in question. Or the policy may be linked to a share index. Such policies are usually referred to as ‘unit-linked’ or ‘linked long term contracts’ (‘unités de compte’ in French and ‘fondsgebundene’ in German). The expression ‘unit-linked’ is in a sense a subset of ‘linked long term’ since an assurance contract may link directly to the value of a non-unitised asset, although that is rare. They give rise to a number of legal and regulatory issues.