Can protection be underwritten solely through telemetrics and big data? Darren Spriggs believes it can and explains all to Paul Robertson.
“What we will see is an acceleration of people turning to those channels, because it becomes the social norm to buy in certain ways, with certain products, with certain customer journeys.”
The elephant in the room here is that aggregators will want to alter the parameters of the product to fit them more cosily on their sites. It is nearly impossible to compare critical illness online at the moment, for example.
Spriggs is adamant that this is the case and the days of complex, potentially confusing sets of questions are gone: “If I have a frustration as somebody coming in, relatively new, into the industry, it is that genuine innovation is not where it needs to be, because customer journeys and products need to be simple to understand.
“Some of the language we use regarding medical histories, for example. People cannot relate to that. Oh yes, my blood pressure 76 months ago when I last went to the doctor was this. People just do not retain that information.
“There is an opportunity to simplify the number of questions, or reduce the number of questions, and to simplify the language.”
As might be surmised, Spriggs sees simple products as a way forward, although he has questions regarding the best value for consumers.
“There are a couple of fundamental questions for me. One is: is some cover better than none? Regarding IP, we have done some work with our reinsurers, and I think that the evidence stacks up that a simplified IP, on some occasions, is not great value.
“In principle though, I am a fan of people taking that first step on the ladder, which is to become more aware and conscious of what they need if the worst-case scenario happens. If simplified products are a route to this, that is beneficial. And that is where the technology comes back in.”
So the challenge is to actually make people take out worthwhile protection. Well, all of this actually predicates on a change in underwriting. You cannot have simple products, or easily bought products, or online products, as standard with intrusive questions about blood pressure.
The subject is one of Spriggs’ bug-bears: “Having been at a number of conferences and events in the past two or three months, the standard item on the agenda is to talk about predictive underwriting, or life-style pricing. I am pretty sure that those presentations existed three, five, possibly even 10 years ago. The same things are being talked about, but they are not entering into the mainstream business.
