Advisers should regularly engage with millennial customers to help close the ‘protection gap’, the founder of life insurer has said, as he criticised protection for being "unfathomably complex".
Speaking at a Protection Review event yesterday (July 9), Phil Zeidler, co-founder of DeadHappy, said a large part of the protection gap was made up of millennials.
In order to close the gap, Mr Zeidler suggested the industry should regularly engage with millennial policyholders and help them understand the value of a protection product.
He said: “Given that people’s needs are changing all the time, why do we not speak to the customer every year to check if their plan meets their needs?”
Mr Zeidler added that complexity was contributing to the protection gap: “The majority of millennials have simple needs and want simple and easy products to meet them. Life insurance remains full of jargon and unfathomably complex terms and conditions”.
He said the industry needed to design simple products millennials understand, as well as a user experience that “meets their expectations”.
Describing a mismatch between how life insurance policies are sold and the purchasing habits of millennials, Mr Zeidler said: “Over 90 per cent of life insurance companies require you to speak to someone, either face-to-face or over the phone. Is that how millennials buy things? No.
“They don’t want to speak to anyone at all, let alone face-to-face. There’s only a very small handful of life propositions you can actually buy online and none that are genuinely mobile-first.”
chloe.cheung@ft.com
