“Key to this, is demonstrating how effective employee benefits can be in attracting and retaining the best people to work for the company and why looking after employee health and wellbeing is good for business,” says AIG Life head of propositions Tasneem Harnekar.
This is something that McLoughlin seems to be well on top of. “Group income protection is the most talked-about product now with our SME clients, because it’s the only thing that helps them with the kind of employee wellbeing issues that Covid-19 really brought to the fore, like stress and burnout.
“When SMEs know there’s an insurance-based solution, their eyes light up, because they usually don’t have the expertise in the company and don’t know how to handle mental health issues. I’ll mention early intervention in the first few minutes of a group income protection sales conversation now.”
Interesting, considering that for most price seems to still represent the dominant factor in group protection discussions, according to Harper, who says this is “fuelled by the two to three-year renewal cycle, which is unhealthy”.
Consumer engagement
He adds that top challenges for the individual protection market are reach and relevance, otherwise referred to as “consumer engagement” by some of our commentators. He references volumes of new policy sales, which have remained “disappointingly static” over the past 10 to 15 years, “particularly if you consider the recycling of some products”.
“Significant tranches of the population — by age/generation, sector or health — are excluded and underserved. And the fixed, long-term nature of protection contracts struggles to match and respond to contemporary living and working practices,” Harper says.
“More needs to be done by all parties in the value chain to take protection of people, driven by and responding to what they’re doing, where and how they’re doing it, and what’s of interest to them in that moment.”
Kevin Carr is managing director and Suzanne Clarkson is associate consultant at Carr Consulting & Communications
