Insurance is a very complicated subject and Insurances companies are ace at making it more complicated.
This person was offered this cover with a bank account he opened. In these cases the bank is only interested in the person opening the account, which I assume is a fee based account. He would have been told there were add on benefits included with the account, the travel insurance included, but the bank person would not go into details of these add ons.
You see they do not expect you to actually use the add ons, they are just a tempt to get you to open the account.
Long ago, bank were trusted implicitly, but for many years this has not been so and only in the last few years has this been made apparent.
When buying a service or goods, it is said, 'Let the buyer beware', when dealing with banks this is more so. When opening a bank account, you are just buying another service, so beware.