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Five months after Bupa started merging its UK and global insurance teams, commercial director for insurance in the UK Richard Norris (pictured) tells Health & Protection about the rationale behind the move and if it’s working as expected.
What was the driving force behind combining the global and UK insurance teams here in the UK?
We have a big ambition around connected care, which means different things for advisers, our customers and our people.
In bringing together those businesses, we can face the UK market as one; it simplifies it.
It means one person goes to a broker to talk about our products, whereas before two people were going in.
This enables us to have a broader conversation with the adviser about PMI, international PMI, dental insurance or cash plans, rather than having slightly disparate approaches.
It is the same for customers. We have several large corporate accounts that have both domestic and international PMI and we were almost passing each other in reception to see them. Now we have one conversation with those customers.
Not all customers or brokers are set up that way. It is worth recognising that some advisers have an international division and a domestic division, and they do not know who each other are.
We still respect that, but where it makes sense we are bringing them together.
Also 82% of claims on international PMI policies are made in the UK for domestic businesses.
That brings us a big opportunity from joining the two up: we have fantastic pathways in the UK that those customers can now experience, particularly in London where most of those customers are.
It enables us to give a better patient experience when people get into that position.
How does the single-contact function work and what have been the other changes for advisers?
We now have one broker team led by Rob Bain, who leads a team of business development managers who work across PMI and IPMI.
They will be going out to about 2,200 brokers having one conversation based on what they want to advise their clients on, as opposed to having two teams, which we had before. That is working well.
When a customer then wants a quote, it is fulfilled separately.
How has the implementation progressed in the first five months?
It has been good and it seems to be resonating well. Advisers and our customers will be the judge of it.
We are combining two big teams in different locations and there are lots of people on the road as well so there are always things to work through.
There has been a lot of cross-skilling, helping the UK domestic people understand the Bupa Global products, and vice versa.
We have won several schemes in the corporate and SME markets where we are joining the two together, which is what you want from a commercial perspective.
We can now view a client as a whole client rather than two products. We are having a much broader conversation about a customer’s health and wellbeing ambitions, as opposed to thinking about them differently because of the way we are set up.
It has led to a much more customer-centric conversation with the adviser, but also with the customer where we have that relationship.
We have also identified gaps in our proposition that we will be plugging next year to make it run even smoother.
Are you seeing greater crossover between domestic and international PMI sales?
Yes, a lot of it is awareness. Many people buy IPMI because they do not want to have pre-authorisation, they want to go where they want, they want more choice.
They are trying to buy a more comprehensive product to use in the UK that maybe has a few benefits when they travel – that is the driver.
But that has not always been the driver in international PMI. It has been less used locally, and much more globally as people travel around. That is quite a change.
The opportunity for us is opening the funnel up on the domestic side and getting the awareness of that international product being available to customers who might approach us for a domestic policy.
That is a shift in terms of buyer behaviour we are seeing in the UK and globally and it is an opportunity for us to capitalise on.
Are any other initiatives planned to improve the efficiency of your adviser-facing operations?
We are always striving to be better. It is continuing to upskill our people, ensuring they can speak to advisers across the products we have available, whether it be international PMI, domestic PMI, dental, cash plan, or whatever it might be.
That is always an ongoing piece as well as bringing the Bupa difference to life for advisers.