Critical illness

This type of insurance provides lump sums or regular payments in the event of the diagnosis of a serious health condition. It may be particularly distressing when someone is diagnosed with a debilitating illness only to find that living with the illness brings increased everyday costs such as travel to hospital, adaptations to their home, higher energy bills, or increased childcare costs. The products relieve some of the financial pressure at a time of unique stress for the customer. Our role as reinsurers can vary from full involvement in product design and implementation, giving expert advice and support in key areas, or simply sharing the risk as a reinsurer.

Our flexibility in terms of how we support clients, together with our vast international experience, puts us in an excellent position to offer fresh ideas and insights. The quality of the definitions is key in a CI product, both to ensure that the customer understands the cover, and to effectively manage risk. We have worked extensively with clients to cover a wide range of conditions, as well as helping to tailor products to ensure the benefits are paid only when the illness has a profound impact on the daily life of the policyholder. This may include focusing on the prognosis of the consumer more than the diagnosis. We are also developing products to help end customers make adjustments to their routines after a life-changing condition is identified.

We work closely with clients to design products aimed at filling specific funding gaps. For example, new treatments that are not available on traditional health insurance plans or through national health services may be funded through an enhancement to a critical illness product.

In a further area of development, our digital solutions are supporting clients in taking the underwriting process online, with the ability to issue policies on the spot. We are working on supporting a variety of digital distribution channels to support the products that are increasingly being purchased online and through price comparison websites.

In addition, we are looking at solutions which combine different channels, so that processes which begin online, for example, can be completed through an advisor, or vice versa. These would be geared towards the insurer’s own risk appetite and distribution strategy, recognising the fact that there is no standard solution for our clients and their end customers.