Generali Vitality | A little healthier every day
Bruno Scaroni — Group Chief Transformation Officer (Generali)
Simon Guest — Generali Vitality CEO
As Digital Insurance Group we have the privilege to talk to the leading insurers and love to learn from their experience while adding our technological solutions and views. In this series we share the views of some outstanding people in the life and health insurance market. We ask them about how they embrace life& wellbeing as an insurance company and how they look ahead. This week we talk to Generali who has the exclusive Vitality rights in Europe.
Bruno starts the conversation explaining that Generali is a life insurer and a premium EU leader in that space. Generali aims to be a Lifetime Partner to its clients. “Transforming our role to a trusted advisor, providing integrated solutions that add genuine value to people’s lives, health, home, mobility and work and support them in achieving their life goals & dreams”. Solutions that clearly go beyond insurance.
In this Lifetime Partner Model, wellbeing is core, which is why Generali teams up with Discovery S.A. and has the exclusive rights for Vitality in Europe since 2016. This implies that Generali gives 300 million clients access to these Vitality services — in Italy, Germany, Austria, Spain and France, Poland and Czech Republic to come the first half of 2022.
Apart from this ambition, Simon and Bruno clearly see the benefits: NPS is climbing high, top line has increased and Generali proudly sees itself in ‘the blue league’ of insurers.
Bruno sees clear demographic trends, also referring to his home country Italy. People are getting much older and have a high life expectancy. So long term support and services are needed.
Generali Vitality has been a learning opportunity throughout the organization, including Distribution. Generali traditionally relies on agent networks, which means agents are geared toward selling life insurance and it is not always easy for them to bundle this with other services. Plus, it meant a shift from life savings to life& health. For an agent this means you suddenly need to talk about prevention and claims, instead of having a long-term savings conversation.
Yet the results are stunning: agents use Vitality to evolve to being a lifetime partner, sell more and get active engagement. And during the pandemic it turned out to be a great tool to do regular check-ups, work outs and benefit from partners like Amazon and Adidas. Not only as a reward system but in fact to stay healthy.
Simon adds some interesting facts and figures about Generali Vitality the past year:
- 2/3 do an annual health check in the app to understand where they are
- 40 to 45% have a weekly upload of data on their activities
- In Germany 25% made it to a platinum status level (eating well and having an activity level higher than at starting point, uploading vaccination certificates, exercising)
- Food and nutrition play a key role: the app has a questionnaire on nutrition (as this contributes to the Vitality age) and there is a partnership with HelloFresh (home cooking, fresh ingredients)
- There are different results for different business models: corporate business (employer, broker) turns out to be less engaged. Simon has an overall perception that motivation is less when being pushed by employers, possibly because of data use, possibly because of Generali being less known as a brand with employees
- The only unknown metric today is the profitability, as these types of propositions typically lead to an anti-selection of products and “health maniacs”. Plus, it takes time to see the emergence of differential profitability in life insurance. Yet so far, the social impact is impressive thus satisfactory.
Is Generali investing in prevention services? Without a doubt! Generali gives access to services like biometrics, early detection apps, visual signs apps to predict diseases. All examples of early detection instead of symptom treatments. In most markets people do not have sufficient screenings on a yearly basis, like what you are used to with your car. With tech innovation that now becomes more feasible.
When it comes to privacy and data sharing, Bruno and Simon are very clear: customer feedback shows that people are reluctant so long as they do not perceive real value for them in sharing. They compare it to how willing people are in sharing multiple address in Amazon. If it feels reliable and it makes the whole experience better, it is OK.
Until now, health data are solely used to improve the program itself, but they are not used for pricing or underwriting. For legal reasons, there is a clear separation between the Vitality data and the use of insurance data.
Life insurance underwriting is a one-time upfront measure. It could be very beneficial for clients to use the Vitality data as dynamic underwriting data, thereby assessing the development of lifestyle and wellbeing instead of one single moment. The Vitality Age for example is an interesting health status proxy. Here you have a clear starting point. And with a healthy lifestyle you can get more discounts and improve your status (gold, platinum).
Being part of an ecosystem or doing everything yourself is a decision that Generali takes case by case. In some non-core and tech areas it is better to have partners, in other areas, where there is a major client impact, Generali chooses to insource. The reward program also made Generali add partners like Garmin, Adidas, Expedia and health stores to give value beyond the initial reward program. For Generali there is also a side benefit: new corporate relationships may arise. Asking about using these partners as distribution channels, gets a negative answer. For now.
Talking about the health ecosystem, claims handling comes up several times in the interview. There are innovations when it comes to dedicated claims handing. Think assistance — especially when travelling- and pioneering telemedicine. Especially services and medical records, access to networks, consultations, caregivers. Or a platform with supply and demand for caretakers, for the benefit of customers. Especially in Italy life expectancy is high, which means more and more services need to be added for an aging population. Generali is experimenting with new technologies in markets to find new pieces of the puzzle.
How does the future look like? Bruno sees people need more life and health insurance to cover the needs of an ageing population. Also because of Covid there is more attention for Life and Health products. At the same time Bruno sees an untapped opportunity in bundling the Life offering in Savings and Investment with Health, to offer some decumulation value proposition to customers at a certain stage of the lifecycle. Like what banks do with a reverse mortgage. He foresees that the player that cracks this nut of such bundling will be the winner in Life and Health.
Simon sees that the big issue of the market is that “we still sell death and sickness”. The transition that needs to take place is that we need to add value add services and have a clear positioning and bundling to customers. People need to understand and see this instead of the old and ‘black’ messaging.
