Life and health insurers must rethink how they design and deliver cover as fragmented customer journeys, rising medical inflation and ageing populations put pressure on traditional product-led models, executives said across panels at Insurtech Connect Asia on Thursday (2 July) in Singapore.
The shift should start with moving away from product distribution and toward customer outcomes, said Debasri Ghosh, head of general insurance and health propositions at Standard Chartered.
“Most market participants, I think, across banks, insurers, and other ecosystem providers, we have a very product-led view of the world,” Ghosh said. “Clients think about life holistically; they think about the amount of money they need to hold today for their day-to-day expenses, how much they need to save for their kids’ education or their mortgage, what happens to them if they fall sick… but the delivery of the solutions to help clients navigate all of these life needs, that’s broken today.”
To address that, Standard Chartered has built its health and wellness proposition around three pillars—prevention, protection and an ecosystem of value-added services—delivered through a single digital engagement layer.
Delivering more personalised experiences will also require insurers to overcome fragmented customer data, Ghosh said. Although insurers already hold significant amounts of information, they often struggle to combine it into a complete view of customers, making it difficult to tailor propositions or measure whether they are creating meaningful value.
Thomas Kapeller, global head of partnership at Chubb Life, said customers are generally willing to share data if insurers are transparent about how it will be used and what benefits they will receive in return, allowing insurers to better personalise products and coverage.
“If I know transparently what data you need and what value it creates for me, then I’m happy to give it to you,” Kapeller said. “(Sharing your data) shouldn’t be something that prevents you from getting coverage or support, just because I know more about you.”
Beyond cost-containment
Speakers also argued that simply negotiating lower healthcare costs will not keep pace with rising medical inflation and demographic change.
“It’s a mentality problem among the insurance industry,” said Kim-Fredrik Schneider, CEO and co-founder of telehealth company Abi Global Health. “If we continue to chase a cost-containment strategy, where we try to make it harder for patients, and we haggle over 3% here and there with providers, we’re not going to solve this.”
Medical inflation outpaced premium growth in Malaysia last year, prompting planned premium hikes of up to 70%, which sparked public outcry.
Instead of focusing on incremental savings, insurers should seek to improve patient outcomes while reducing unnecessary healthcare spending, Schneider said.
“We need to shift from a cost containment mentality to a value generation mentality,” he said. “What are we doing to make patients’ lives easier, and in so doing, managing costs?”
One way to achieve that is through care navigation—guiding patients toward appropriate treatment before unnecessary care occurs—rather than relying primarily on negotiating lower prices with healthcare providers.
Not just tacked on
Many insurers still fail to integrate value-added services such as telehealth into the customer journey, resulting in low utilisation and limited financial benefits, executives warned.
“You have a lot of insurers that say ‘my competitor has a telehealth provider, I need a telehealth provider’, and then you tick that box, but then they say ‘there’s no utilisation’,” said Tomas Holub, CEO and founder of CoverGo. “I’m not getting cost savings; there’s no efficiency.”
Schneider said the challenge is less about offering technology than ensuring customers can easily access and use it at the right point in their healthcare journey. Having services be accessible for customers would help insurers drive higher utilisation of these value-added services, converting and underused cost line into actual efficiency gains and cost savings.
Similarly, insurers should focus on helping customers actively manage their health risks rather than simply paying claims, said Willem Hoesen, SVP for health insurance in the Asia-Pacific at Sompo. Sompo’s InsurHealth solution ties incentives to health behaviours, rewarding healthy behaviour with broader access, and builds in flexibility to cover treatment beyond strict policy terms when it’s medically necessary.
“We’re not just talking about how much coverage we want or are willing to pay, but we are also thinking about what value-added services we can offer to the customers,” Hoesen said.
Ultimately, cost management is not a zero-sum game, said Zhang Xuan, head of accident and health at Everest Re.
“We all want a healthier system, we want a healthier community,” Zhang said. “Insurance companies are not thinking about cutting benefits, but how to manage the benefits better, how to reduce overconsumption; we don’t want to control overuse.”
