Health & Protection spoke to Damian Lenihan (pictured), executive director – Europe at Aetna International, about the global insurer’s experience of the crisis, its plans now and how it sees itself working with intermediaries in future.
How has Aetna coped with the pandemic?
“The pandemic is changing and shaping the way people work and travel. Many people were trapped in locations; they couldn’t get back to their home locations. Where we were usually evacuating members with urgent medical needs to certain locations, sometimes those locations were closed to us, or there were new testing requirements. It was quite complicated, but the sector has coped well. We haven’t seen the reduction in members we thought we might have and generally it has held its own.
“For our business, we looked at three things – how we supported our own staff, how we supported our brokers and how we supported members and plan sponsors. We came out with some clear rules in terms of what we were and were not covering, we changed our policy to cover some things we hadn’t normally – testing for example. We mitigated and stopped charging co-pays in relation to Covid-19.”
Where do things stand now?
“We cover many jurisdictions, but it does feel broadly that things are getting more back to normal – we have done a lot in Dubai, we have seen Singapore and Hong Kong release lockdown and then briefly going back in. A lot depends on travel restrictions. If they start being lifted, we will start to see people travelling abroad and perhaps returning to the locations where they were ex-patriot workers in the first place.
“I would say the sector is starting to recover at different paces in different locations. But we are seeing green shoots. If you use membership of our schemes as a metric, we are seeing schemes growing, so we are in a recovery phase.
“We have taken this as an opportunity to adapt. We already had quite a broad product. The insurance part was in the middle, but we did a lot of pre-trip planning and supported people in their working locations in terms of employee assistance and crisis support. Now we have further strengthened our support for mental health, which is the key priority.
“In the surveys we’ve conducted with HR departments and employees, 70% of employees of global businesses said mental health was more important to them and they have been negatively affected during the pandemic. They said provision of mental health and wellbeing services by their employer will be viewed very well. It is more important to them now than before the pandemic. We have partnered with Wysa – an online mental health application, a service that we provide free of charge to our members, intermediaries and our own employees.”
What are the next immediate steps?
“We are really keen to get back in the office as an organisation. We reopened the London office a few weeks ago, where roles are critical. Farnborough has been open in small numbers. We want to see what the future looks like in terms of working from home and working in the office and what we would call agile working. For our clients, recovery is around getting people back to their ex-patriot location and getting the business back and running.”
What are your plans for the business from here?
“We have always been a business that has been driven by growth. In the European segment I look after, we have doubled that book of business in the last five years. We are always looking to grow and develop so will continue that strategy, partnering with more clients and developing our relationships with both them and brokers, to support their growth and also their wellbeing. Our way of doing that is through innovation.”
How will you work with intermediaries?
“Intermediaries are a fundamental part of the sector itself partly because international insurance, with so many jurisdictions is relatively complex. It also usually requires third-party help and advice. They are a key part of the market. Intermediaries have supported us very well through our last five years of growth. They also help us in terms of positioning the proposition with the plan sponsors, giving them a view of what is happening in their business segment and supplying data. They are also good with helping clients imagine what the future looks like and helping them see what the challenges may be.”
How important are advisers as a source of local knowledge?
“We are a global business and we have offices in many locations but not everywhere and an intermediary may be able to provide relevant advice to those clients. We are seeing more multinational clients who may contract out of London with offices in Dubai, Singapore or Hong Kong so this brings a level of complexity given different requirements.”
How do you see the rest of the year in terms of insurers and intermediaries working together?
“We want to help stabilise the market. We want to help brokers and clients understand what we are seeing in terms of trends, especially claims trends and how we see things from a recovery point of view. But the most important part is probably developing our product, getting the feedback from clients saying what they would like to see moving forwards. We have a range of options around physical and mental wellbeing for members and clients. We want to know if they are being used fully and if they are hitting the mark.”
How are you helping your employees moving back to work?
“We have spent a lot of time thinking about what work looks like going forwards. It is clear a five-day week in the office is not going to be the norm moving forward. So, we have to be flexible but that drives other things such as how you manage remote workers better, how you create platforms for collaboration so they can connect online. It is those things that can get us back into work, but work will certainly be different.”