Spend a vision with me: The line between life and general insurance is getting blurred

Almost a year ago I argued that most functionalities of traditional insurance policy administration systems (PAS) or core system, could be easily replicated by using tools which all major cloud vendors have made available to subscribers (1).

Basically traditional PAS were basically a rule/calculation engine plus a workflow management system plus a document management system.

Think about it.

Any policy you buy today, the premiums you will pay over your lifetime, based on current assumptions, are already calculated. After all that's how the insurance company priced the product. All the say, age-driven, premium changes exist at inception. Then it's just a question of applying these rules.

The rules are part of workflows. First for acquisition, then for renewal and re-evaluation. (There also would be workflows for claims...)

Finally, all this is managed in a document management system since there may be lot of paperwork. Of course the insurer can control that within limits set by local regulators, go as electronic as possible...

Technology has moved on. Now with or without blockchain, large chunks of workflows and document management can be automated. Blockchain's "immutability" of the past helps in building and maintaining trust and avoiding post-hoc retrospective changes, but this is more important for organisations that do not have reputation/trust to start with.

Smart contracts are not the privilege of blockchain. Many smart contracts built on blockchain rely on the immutability of the past and the lack of trust to work. But this need not always be the case. (Afterall you trusted you efforts on pokemon-go with all its complex rules, real time activity, activity and reward storage to non-blockchain based systems, but I am not saying blockchain is useless, far from it, but this is not the topic of the blog)

One not so new but now more widely practiced approach is containerisation with orchestration that further makes the little machines built for specific purposes more portable, secure, and cheaper to operate.

So in sum, I am an even more strident advocate of running the insurance policy administration functions (and more) without a clunky traditional core system simply because it can be done, cheaper, better, faster, more reactive, and even proactive.

Today I am going further in my charge towards the traditional insurer windmill.

I am going to give some reasons why I believe that the dichotomy between life and general insurance is an anachronism. To me, as insurance becomes more and more of a service that is consumed in a context, the distinction between life and GI becomes irrelevant.

First of all, let me be clear; I believe in horses for courses. When you do your financial planning, whether on the back or an envelope or using complicated AI, it pays to have clarity as to what your objectives are. Your financial planner or the chat bot you use should help you.

I will also make a disclaimer here, I own a few traditional policies, endowments rather than term policies because when I made the purchase, monthly investment options were limited (yes I am that old and backward), hence endowment products offered me a nice combination.

But this isn't the case anymore, regular (even irregular) savings/investment plans are common.

Hence, today it is easy to split savings/investment goals from insurance/protection goals.

Insurance and Savings/Investment can easily be decoupled

So my first step towards my argument is that it is not necessary to couple insurance and savings thanks to democratisation of savings and investment.

People buy life insurance so that their loved ones have something to fall back on in case of their deaths or themselves in case of disability (death and total permanent disability (tpd) usually coupled).

So if someone plans properly, decouple their goals, and "life insurers" come up with right products, life policies can become plain, no-frill term policies. The investment bit of endowment of life policies can be removed. Of course though, traditional life insurers would not want to do that, their profits would suffer.

But in any case, why, you argue would that affect the dichotomy?

One of the major differences between LI and GI today is the complexity of products, including the 'life-span' of the products, therefore the pricing and actuarial wizardry, including reserve and solvency calculations required.

But if life is reduced to term, then despite the still different product life-spans, the degree of complexity falls. Yes, you will still have non-cancellable features, but the degree of complexity drops by quite a lot with term policies.

Lifestyle choices – more people have taken care of themselves

Another step is that the way people need insurance is changing because people's lifestyles are changing.

I bought insurance quite late compared to my contemporaries. The reason is simple, I argued that my parents were taken care of by their savings/pension schemes, and if I died the main impact would be emotional (I hope haha). It is surviving that was my concern and I saw insurance as compulsory savings, so in my mind the 2 reasons were - in case I survive something bad, tpd kind of stuff and in case I survive longer and need to fund my own 'retirement'.

NTUC Income has a nice campaign in Singapore, and has the same spirit: the best gift for your children is protecting your own retirement (2). So they have seen the increasing need for inter-generational independence that has arisen with the loosening of extended family structures, urbanisation and focus on self or a really small nucleus that shrinks over time.

Basically while you have dependents a term policy would be useful, once you don't you only need the fruit of your savings/investments. Hence, decoupling insurance and investment works in this area too.

Lifestyle choices – temporary increase in risk, convergence more GI-like less Life-like

To this lifestyle change I would add an extra one: the temporary increase in risk that warrants insurance. For example, many health or life policies exclude cases when the insured party is taking place in “competitive sports”. Hence as the insured you have 2 choices, either you pay even more for a policy that doesn’t have that exclusion if you can find one, or you purchase coverage just for this period where your main policy does not apply.

Personally, I find the second option more attractive. Now, is the policy that covers my life for say specific day, a life policy (covers life, pays fixed amount upon death…) or a general policy (short term, single premium, relatively simple actuarial calculations…)?

Basically the lines between the 2 are getting blurred, and in my view, the policies are taking on more characteristics of general insurance than life. Taking a look at some such products available, it becomes obvious that this is a repurposed product, likely a travel product (3), not a product built for purpose.

Big Data and Synergies/Convergence

One important aspect of the dichotomy is that the focus is on the organisation, on the operations, the actuarial work required, in other words, the focus is on the navel. "You know, a life product is so different from a GI product, we need to get that product right!"

What the navel gazers are missing out on is customer-centricity. What makes you think that this product in your navel is what customers need?

The potential customer does not care whether he/she is buying a life insurance, or a general insurance, all the customer needs is that the specific protection that they require is given to them at an affordable price and via a channel they prefer and preferably right before they need it.

The potential customer generates tons of data that an insurer can have access to and learn about the needs of each individual, even proactively make the offer. This is something insurers have been slow to learn.

Contrary to banks who are used daily by their customers and who see constant interaction with them as a matter of routine, insurers have traditionally only interacted with their customers (and that via agents/brokers) quite rarely. Hence not only do the organisations know only little about the customers, but the whole sales process insurers have been using is heavy, making insurance an important decision – it is when the consequences of decisions are long term, financial investments quite heavy, and there is limited information on the customer. Hence there is a lot of thought that has to go into advice, planning, and managing risks.

But now, with big data, insurers can learn more about their customers, and at a minimum get a better estimate of the risk each customer faces daily, this can allow the insurer to manage the risk, offer a more appropriate premium to the customer. (The actuarial community should be looking at big data, else their guild-like monopoly will disappear)

Furthermore, the information that can be obtained is so granular that very specific risks can be insured. For example, if I know you have been looking at high altitude climbing, and have ordered specialised gear, the moment you book a trip to Nepal, I can make you a customised offer that will protect you specially for the risks you may encounter, not only to your life, but also including problems with equipment, and include emergency repatriation. If I am smart enough, I can even consult local weather forecasts, and price this is, and keep you informed. This offer that I have customised for you, is it a life product (travel may be?) or a general insurance product (equipment) or is it both (and hence neither)? How about I go further, work with partners and go beyond insurance so our composite offer takes care of your welfare? That brings us to the realm of platforms.

Platforms

So where does that bring us? I believe insurance is a service just like another. Insurance is being slowly but surely embedded in other products services:

buy a car and get offered a comprehensive protection policy that will ensure your car will be repaired and any third party damage covered
get a mortgage and buy a reducing balance term policy to protect your family’s roof in case something happens to you
buy a phone even, and get extended warranty for repairs, or even get a replacement in case your phone gets damages
buy an airline ticket and get compensated for delays (even almost instantly) or lost luggage
buying a long distance bus ticket and have insurance embedded in
run a marathon and get extra protection for the day of the race as part of your race pack

To me this is just the beginning; insurance companies are barely scratching the surface when it comes to collaboration with other product/service providers.

Numerous studies have shown that most people are underinsured, often because they underestimate the risks, often because the current forms of insurance they have access to are too expensive, often because insurance does not reach them. The latter is a result of business strategies employed by traditional insurers, and whether consciously or unconsciously the strategies are driven by the product set available, chunky-clunky, with strict dichotomy between life and GI – you have to adjust your needs to our products. However, less traditional insurers have been hugely successful (4).

We have seen insurers collaborate with other platforms grab and ZhongAn “The tie-up will address the usual pain points of insurance discovery, unaffordable premiums and payment options by allowing for insurance premium payments to be adjusted and automatically deducted through GrabPay or its affiliate payment partners”(5), but this is not going far enough, this is an insurer taking advantage of a new channel and payment platform. Another interesting idea is from Alibaba (6), but why are the platforms led by non-insurers?

Simply because too many insurers are too fixated on life/non-life dichotomy, on old fashioned table driven (granted it is probably in a neat interface rather than dusty book nowadays, but still is fixed rule driven) risk estimation, on being afraid of customer interaction (because this often means complaints of claims).

Conclusion

In my view, in the future, insurers will be doing business via platforms where offers from various industries will be available and customers consuming insurance in small chunks sometimes almost unknowingly, probably after having a term type protection, similarly investing as and when they feel like it. Successful insurers would have learnt to be customer centric to such a degree that they are able to proactively tailor protection/coverage to short term lifestyle experiences of their customers. For that, being able to mash together all sorts of coverage will be critical, and hence insurers who harp on the distinction between life and non-life (GI) are very unlikely to be winners.

Spend a vision with me

Wednesday, 20 March 2019

The line between life and general insurance is getting blurred - convergence in insurance

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