Focusing on the three Cs of communication, compliance and compassion can ensure the IPMI market develops the right agenda, Owain Thomas hears.
A wish list can be a dangerous thing potentially allowing people to set unattainable goals or dreams which can ultimately leave them disappointed.
But when given the opportunity to set blue sky aspirations the panel at Health & Protection’s North America roundtable in Rockefeller Plaza, New York were remarkably realistic in their goals.
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Improving communications, easing compliance stress, addressing pricing to support market sustainability, efficiency, and making things a little more human were the overarching aims.
Trawick International business development director Anders Blak first identified the critical role that communication can play for the industry and where he would like to see it improved.
In particular he highlighted being more proactive with customers to help address their needs before they need to ask.
“There are probably several things we could do,” Blak said.
“One would be proactively sending limited information out to various members about some of the key trends we see and how we could support them, if any would be applicable.”
Compliance and simplification
Compliance, technology and simplification were major issues brought under one roof by two of the panel.
Insured Nomads chief operating officer Chris Nam flagged the potential for helping to improve consumer understanding of their policies.
“I’d like to see AI that can legally and compliantly reach through policy documents and breakdown the 70 pages for policyholders, so they understand in simpler terms what is covered and what is not,” he said.
“But that must be in compliance with regulation so that even a broker doesn’t have to do too much work, which kind of sounds like I’m trying to make people lazy, but people don’t understand everything.
“Even if a broker explains every single page of a document to someone, they might interpret it wrong, they might understand a sentence in a different way. It might just not be communicated in the right way.
“So the customer thinks something is covered, they just go to file a claim and be done with it but then later unexpectedly an email arrives asking for 16 different documents and then they don’t want to go get them.
“AI is improving, there is a way to get there, but I don’t like doing things out of legal circumstances. I’d like to see how that happens and I think it’s coming.”
Lockton Companies senior benefits consultant Tara Black raised a similar theme on communicating with members and clients.
“I agree in terms of technology; trying to streamline information down to the end user to make things as easy as possible,” she said.
“All we can really want is for people to use something that works and the expectation is there to make it a little less difficult to use what’s available to them, especially because the product is so expensive.”
Transparency and value for money
That point about achieving, recognising and maintaining value for money for what can be quite an expensive product was also raised by others on the panel.
With price increases regularly volatile, maintaining transparency and understanding for customers is crucial.
International Citizens Insurance president Joe Cronin noted the issue of pricing was crucial for his clients, particularly some more than others.
“It’s really frustrating to buy a plan today and maybe be told its going to increase 6% to 8% per year, then it increases 15% in year three when they didn’t plan for that,” he said.
“Then in year four someone goes from 59 to 60 years old, so suddenly on a plan that has age-based pricing, it may mean an increase of 10% base that year plus a further 15% or 20%.
“And so now you have a 30% increase when you turn 60. This is really unfair and frustrating to say the least, for not having some kind of consistency in pricing over the policy coverage period.”
There was also a wider more philosophical view about how the market was operating with potentially too much focus on profit.
Vera Mira, principal – expatriate benefits COE at Mercer Marsh Benefits Multinational Advisory, suggested the industry could be helped by the addition of some other types of insurance models which could instil different overarching approaches, commonly seen in other insurance sectors.
“Maybe some not-for-profit organisations would help,” she said.
“Perhaps if there were not-for-profit or mutual organisations with pooling where everybody is in that, it would be different.
“It would be more skin in the game and I think profit sometimes gets in the way of things getting done,” she added.
Effiency and compassion
Action to optimise efficiencies and make things run smoother was a common theme among the panellists.
A charge often laid at the insurance industry around the world is that it can be slow to act and react when needed to. While stability that the sector provides is often reassuring, in today’s world with progress and change so fast in so many sectors it can be noticeable when the industry falls behind.
Flywire strategic director, insurance Manny Socorro highlighted looking at more than just the basics of insurance policy underwriting to help the sector maximise its output.
“For me the conversations we always have is just around how can insurance companies in particular be more efficient,” Socorro said.
“There’s so many things that can be done to lower costs that fall outside of the underwriting aspect of things that insurers don’t focus on.
“And I always struggle with why certain things that should be so easy to do, they don’t do.”
Throughout Health & Protection’s years of annual industry research, the highest priority for respondents is always related to the people who work across the industry providing the best service and outcomes to business partners and ultimately end members.
With that in mind, it was left to International Citizens Insurance COO Gregg Manning to bring the focus back to what the industry does, or should, do best – providing compassionate and essential support when things go wrong.
“Thinking about some people we know in insurance companies I’m finding it difficult to find people who are contextually aware of the situation,” he said.
“So examples of underwriting sending out a very cold email to an upset mother with a sick child. In this industry people need to be more contextually aware, they need to be compassionate and be conscientious.
“People like that can drive the technological innovation and just make everybody’s experience much better.
“You need those skills to be able to solve the problems with technology – just developing apps in your IT bubble without having leadership outside of it that understand the context and the people that it touches, is why a lot of them fail,” he concluded
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