[SPONSORED CONTENT]
Entering a new advice market can prove difficult and fraught with potential pitfalls at every corner, but the rewards for advisers and clients can be significant.
In this Q&A sponsored by AXA Health, advisers from two firms who have started selling health insurance in the last five years explain the key issues they faced, strategies they put in place and support received from insurers when growing their operations.
Please could you introduce yourself, your company and your health insurance service?
I’m Poonam Khan, head of private medical insurance at LifeSearch. Our purpose has always been simple – to protect people properly. For more than 25 years, we’ve helped families, individuals and businesses make confident, informed choices about their protection, and now we’re bringing that same approach to private medical insurance (PMI).
I’m Jeremy Reed, client director and our health lead at Partners&. I have overall responsibility for the health proposition and the insurer relationships. We’re a multi-disciplinary advice firm across all insurances with more than 700 staff and we’ve just celebrated our fifth anniversary. We support clients in the SME and corporate sectors.
How was your experience of introducing health insurance into your product portfolio?
PK: It was both exciting and complex. PMI was always going to be a natural extension of our protection advice, but we knew it needed a different approach, it was important for us to continue our reputation of protecting people properly into PMI, so we invested in external expertise from the outset to avoid the common pitfalls. My focus has been on building the adviser team, embedding a strong culture and putting the right frameworks in place around training, compliance and renewals.
JR: Partners& always had health insurance as part of our core proposition, it’s central to our employee benefits division, but only starting five years ago, it’s been quite a growth curve. We pick up quite a lot of business through our general insurance colleagues. We saw a real clamour after Covid for new PMI policies and we’ve found once we’ve done the promotion of our service, quite a lot of the business naturally walks in the door to us.
Were there any challenges in introducing health insurance and how did AXA Health support you?
PK: One of the biggest things we found is there’s a strong focus on selling moratorium policies in PMI. At LifeSearch we have taken a different approach and, where it’s appropriate, we think full medical underwriting (FMU) first. The industry is used to quick turnaround times getting policies completed, but FMU naturally takes longer and AXA Health have been brilliant in giving us the time and flexibility we need. We’ve built some fantastic relationships with our business development managers, who’ve supported us with the extra attention and detail that really helps our customers. As we’ve been building something new, it’s been important for us to have relationships with insurers who’ve played an active, enabling role in making it all happen. This support has been especially key in our training processes – giving new team members the chance to really deep-dive into the product and to access experts at AXA Health whenever they need guidance
JR: We’ve got quite a varied skill set across our team and one of the biggest challenges has been making sure those more junior executives are coming in with a full knowledge set. We’ve been supported amazingly by AXA Health in terms of consistency of service, both from new business and a retention side – they have been second to none – but also in product knowledge and upskilling our team. We put a huge emphasis on support from insurers because it seriously impacts our ability to do our job efficiently. There are three core pillars we expect from insurers: speed, efficiency and great product. For us, AXA Health have really delivered in all those areas.
What do you think are the most important elements for advisers new to health insurance to understand and learn and what are the key differences for health insurance sales compared to other products?
PK: Advisers need to be confident around underwriting exclusions and how the claim process works, then be able to translate all of that into plain English for customers. Ultimately, it’s about ensuring customers feel well-informed and reassured – and not overwhelmed by jargon. Our focus is on helping advisers communicate that clearly, so they can pass that confidence on to their customers. The support from AXA Health where they’ve been able to help us with that has been really valuable. For us the PMI conversation is more immediate and it’s more personal and dynamic. With life cover you’re talking about what if scenarios, but with PMI it’s about ‘when’ customers need treatment and whether they’ll get it quickly – that changes the dynamic. It’s consultative, it’s detail heavy and requires real patience to guide clients through that journey.
JR: The key element is explaining the complex terms and details in an easy-to-understand manner. I had a client contact me to say they were trying to interpret a benefits booklet and had run it through ChatGPT. They had already identified that the summary ChatGPT had provided was incorrect and there were holes in it. So this gives us a really good understanding of where we can provide a huge amount of value. Another area is surrounding the product advice and how it dovetails with other employee benefits. We know a lot of employee benefits have value added services that in some areas overlap. The key difference for making an outstanding contribution and recommendation in that space is trying to advise as to how those products interlink and how they form a singular benefits package.
What are the main concerns your clients have when going through the health insurance purchase process?
PK: There are two top concerns: cost and cover. Clients want to feel confident they’re paying a fair price and they want clarity about what will be covered when they need it. Underwriting styles can create real uncertainty, especially moratorium – which is why we spend that extra time up front to ensure customers understand exactly what the policy does and does not cover. It does take longer, but it delivers confidence and peace of mind.
JR: Initially, the main concern and the reason why they’ve come to us is often the performance of the NHS. Ultimately when you get into the conversation there’s a huge concern surrounding understanding: getting the decision maker to understand the product they’re purchasing, how that interacts with the NHS, and then understanding by the employee community. The other concern is long term sustainability of pricing and making sure it is going to be affordable for that client in three or five years’ time. The last thing they want to do is to pull a cover because they cannot afford it.