Remember the children’s poem ‘There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly’? There was a rather nice colourful book with holes in it that showed the strangely happy-looking woman munching her way from fly through spider through bird, cat, dog, cow and horse that ended, not surprisingly, in her death.
It could be a parable for group risk. It is an industry that, in the UK, is approaching its 50th birthday. There has been more change and innovation in the world in that same 50 years than most of us can probably remember, but the innovations we’ve introduced in group risk have really just been adding more and more layers (spider, bird, cat, dog…) to the things that caused the problem in the first place: disability, illness and death. Keep adding and adding as we have and group risk insurance as we know it could well be dead, too, before too long.
Work is different today. People are different. Families are different because life is different. While disability, illness and death haven’t gone away, they are not, in many cases, a fundamental business challenge. Businesses are concerned about customers, competitors and talent.
When we describe our insurance offerings as an industry, do we really make an effort to acknowledge these challenges and then work with the clients we support to embed their employee benefits in their business strategy? I don’t think we do. We are still in many ways guilty of reverting to type, following a transactional process rather than looking for value and relevance, and overemphasising the layers that have less relevance these days. Free cover limits, claims management and, dare I say it, price.
In our roundtable discussion, we explored the trends and changes we are witnessing now and will continue to see in the coming years. The consensus view was that change in group risk is emerging, albeit slowly, but that more needs to be done to haul the industry into the world of the modern-day employer. A lot of what is needed wouldn’t traditionally be seen on the CV of an insurance company or even that of an adviser. That statement is not intended as a criticism. What we are experts in is an outcome of the way the products have been applied to the relatively narrow pure insurance promise: pricing for, managing and paying claims.
If employee benefits are to be truly integrated in an organisation’s business strategy, providers and advisers need to be experts in other areas: internal communications, performance management, leadership, business continuity, change. We need to do some of the heavy lifting for the hardworking HR teams out there.
My challenge to our industry is to think differently. I often think that there’s a lot we can learn as adults if we approached the world as a child would. Curiosity, honesty, and seeing and stating the obvious are three traits that as grown-ups we don’t exhibit enough of.
I am keen to hear your views, thoughts, ideas and challenges.
Tom Gaynor is employee benefits director at MetLife UK
