"I am a broker who works exclusively in UK Private Medical Insurance [PMI] and I have heard people say that International Private Medical Insurance [IPMI] is an attractive market. How do I go about getting involved, and what do I need to know before starting out?"
Doug Rice, Jelf International 
What has been a barrier in the past is a fear of the unknown, legislation complexities, the ability to offer products outside of UK and knowledge.
The first thing I would suggest for any intermediary considering this is that there are plenty of resources and support from the insurers who see this as a major development for them.
The existing relationships advisers have with insurers are a really good source of information. Building expert knowledge is critical. It's about getting to know the clients and the territories they operate in, benefit design and licencing capabilities.
There is a latent potential in the existing client bank. Research has shown 12%-15% of an intermediary's SME portfolio will look to trade overseas. They may have existing short-term travel insurance policies, but they may not be suitable in the long term.
If you are a HR professional being advised by an intermediary, you would want to know they are: compliant, have local knowledge can advise on duty of care, are aware of legislation, the legal framework of the particular country they're going to and the company they're working for. It's not enough to provide someone with a policy and send them off on their assignment.
The difficulty arises when you have a local national based in a particular country looking for advice and the client is based in that company and they can't give that advice. It's illegal to do that.They need advice from a locally based intermediary: part of a network for example or a partnership they have created.
Paul Weigall, InterGlobal
The key product differentials are that people will want to buy an international policy because they want to move from one place to another and they won't always stay in the same place.
Therefore, benefits such as evacuation and repatriation are new benefits they would have to understand because they do not feature as part of a domestic PMI plan.
They also need to understand you can't write it on the insurance company's paper: it has to be fronted by a local insurance partner. It's about understanding how insurers work together.
Also, in the UK people sell PMI as an alternative to the NHS for quicker access and better treatment. In the rest of the world, healthcare is not free, particularly in expat areas. The reason why people buy IPMI is not to have access to the best facilities but so they have some level of certainty over what their healthcare costs could be.
Places such as Hong-Kong and Singapore are expensive for healthcare, so it's important to do some level of study on the costs of healthcare abroad. The World Health Organisation has a fantastic website with relative costs of healthcare.
If focusing on corporate business, I suggest they trawl their existing client bank and to look at their web strategy. Is it internationally focused? What level of investment are they putting into e-commerce, such as search engine optimisation, to generate interest? How do you market to expats outside your existing database? The only way to do that is to get the customers to find you through the web and mailshots.
Nic Brown, Aetna International
The products many brokers currently advise on are quite static in terms of growth. The UK PMI is flat: there have been cut-backs as people reduce benefits in the current economic climate.
IPMI is a hugely growing market. Countries are seeing a big exodus of professionals leaving their country to work abroad. It's going to be an ongoing trend.
Companies are becoming more global through acquisition and different distribution capabilities, and looking at different opportunities in new markets. We're seeing a lot of people moving around, and there is a much more barrier-less trend of people moving abroad.
IPMI is a high-value product: it pays high values of commission, and it's a key market that is continuing to grow. The products essentially do the same thing, if you know how health insurance works in terms of benefits and exclusions, and how people use the products, IPMI is no different.
If anything, the product is slightly easier to understand because IPMI, particularly corporate schemes, don't have lots of limits and exclusions. It becomes more technical as you're looking at multiple locations, and systems differ in terms of quality. If you compare someone working in the US with Sierra Leone, they have different challenges.
We have a telephone sales and account team who are experts in regulatory requirements in each region. There are some grey areas such as IPT calculations and how it affects the equivalent P11D in other countries, we are equipped to provide such advice.
