Life and protection insurers should engage in health and wellness as it will allow them to:

“The Future of Health and Wellbeing in Protection”, provides an overview of the health and wellness market. It discusses the potential benefits for insurers entering the space and explores current consumer engagement, attitudes, and retail spending. It also examines how insurers can use customer data to improve their proposition. Protection insurers that engage in promoting health and wellness will benefit from lower claims costs and higher customer uptake and engagement with protection products, which in turn will mean higher profits.

Lower claims costs: Preventing illness through the promotion of health and wellbeing means fewer individuals will get ill and fewer claims will arise. Better monitoring of health will lead to earlier diagnosis and faster access to treatment, which means insurers will pay less in claims when individuals do become ill.

Improve product uptake and customer engagement: Protection products that help customers actively manage and improve their health – and reward them for doing so – will have higher engagement and more touchpoints with customers. Promoting protection will be about the combined benefits of providing health and financial well-being, which should increase uptake.

The overall benefit of both of these factors is higher profits. This will be beneficial to the entire suite of protection products, whether it is life, private medical insurance, income protection, or critical illness insurance. It also applies equally to policies sold to individuals and under group risk. Any type of cover where there is a risk to an individual will benefit from engaging in health and wellness.

It is also rewarding for providers to proactively help improve the lives and health of their customers, taking a role in preventing illness and injury instead of being reactive. It will also help relieve pressure on the NHS.