Firing lineNov 19 2020

VitalityLife boss on dealing with health risks amid a pandemic

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VitalityLife boss on dealing with health risks amid a pandemic

Seeing that people were exercising less as a result of the effects of lockdown and gym closures, it provided free access to home workouts on the Peloton and offered discounts on selected Garmin and Polar devices.

To do a lot of what it does, interpreting data has been incredibly important to VitalityLife, which is believed to be the first insurer in Europe to reward people for healthy living.

Deepak Jobanputra, managing director at VitalityLife, says when the insurer came into the market about 13 years ago, its model of linking the amount of insurance a policyholder pays to how much exercise they did was a relatively novel concept in the UK.

“The market had been commoditised,” says Mr Jobanputra. “[The fact is] most people do not find it exciting or interesting. It is not necessarily at the top of their priorities. People do not wake up in the morning thinking, ‘I’m going to go out and buy life insurance’.

“When we came into the market, we came into it from a different perspective: making people healthier.”

Despite being a young company compared to its life insurance peers, the wealth of data amassed by the insurer has certainly come in handy during Covid-19.

“Those individuals who were more engaged in their health and wellbeing had a 27 per cent lower risk of complications arising from Covid,” says Mr Jobanputra.

“So that’s one really good example of how we can use data to identify that physical activity, health and wellbeing can reduce your chances of complications from Covid.

“But you can take it a step further [to say], if that is the case, can we reach out to high-risk clients and help them to understand they should be maintaining their physical health and looking after their immunity?

“They won’t necessarily do it, but if you can do that, we may find ourselves impacting people’s lives through the use of data.”

VitalityLife started in 2007, but its story goes back to 1992 when its parent company Discovery launched in South Africa as a small, specialist risk insurer.

In 1997, Discovery Vitality was launched to incentivise members to engage in prevention and wellness promotion activities by awarding points that made them eligible to receive rewards including retail, airline and travel discounts.

Seven years later, in a joint venture, Discovery and Prudential launched PruHealth in the UK. 

They offered a different kind of health cover that not only provided people with cover when they were ill, but also helped them stay healthy by offering incentives and rewards.

Then in 2007 Discovery and Prudential launched PruProtect, offering protection products to the UK market.

The name change from PruProtect to VitalityLife took place in 2014, when Discovery took on full ownership of PruHealth and PruProtect, which were rebranded VitalityHealth and VitalityLife, respectively.

Mr Jobanputra has been with VitalityLife since 2007, when he joined as actuarial and product director.

Power of data

Mr Jobanputra says: “We have the benefit of 25 years of data. We use the power of data to tell us what works and what does not.

“We have 50m life years’ worth of data that support this model; that tell us the links between physical activity and mortality.”

This year, that data – perhaps unsurprisingly – has indicated the impact of the virus on people’s mental health and the increase in the number of people looking for life insurance.

A Vitality survey in October revealed that more than half of those surveyed said the pandemic had given them perspective on what is important in life.

It has caused people to reassess whether they are prioritising what matters most to them.

The survey revealed the top priority for most people is spending more time with family (28 per cent), improving health by losing weight (22 per cent), improving mental health and emotional wellbeing (20 per cent), taking better care of personal finances (19 per cent) and making healthier choices with what they eat (18 per cent).

Company changes

As a result, Mr Jobanputra says the insurer has been rolling out changes to make it easier for advisers to process applications.

For example, VitalityLife has made changes to its underwriting process with the aim to reduce the time taken to get underwriting decisions, improve the efficiency of the underwriting process, and make it simpler to take out a protection policy with the insurer.

It is committing to making underwriting decisions within one working day and ensuring easier access to its underwriters by providing advisers with the option to discuss feedback on all cases.

The introduction of Vitality’s Evidence Analyser enables Vitality’s nurses to upload the results of member blood tests to the analyser during the VitalityLife nurse screening. 

The Evidence Analyser will interpret the results and provide an underwriting decision within minutes without the need for an underwriter to manually review the nurse screening results.

VitalityLife also has a pre-sales underwriting tool that can quickly tell the adviser the level of premium the policyholder is likely to pay, before they decide to go through the full application stage.

The tool, rolled out in October, is entirely digital and requires no telephonic contact with underwriters in order to acquire an underwriting decision.

Going into the winter, the insurer is now looking at how it could impact people’s lives.

“We are launching a winter pack, looking at [how we can] push out tools that will help members with their mental health and rewarding them for doing so.”

Ima Jackson-Obot is deputy features editor of FTAdviser and Financial Adviser