The Key Learning Points:

1. The role of digital as an enabler and making protection insurance more accessible to the underserved

2. The importance of choice and empowering consumers to self-serve when it comes to protection

3. How fear of change may be holding us back as an industry and acting as a barrier to innovation

On this week's remote Risky Mix podcast, we're joined by Chris Samuel, business operations director at iPipeline. Chris describes himself as a creative thinker, relationship builder, people motivator and passionate customer experience advocate and we’re excited today to be talking with him about protection and how we can make products more inclusive.

Chris admits that he found his calling when “falling into” an opportunity with the BGL group back in late 1999. A marketeer by trade, Chris always considers the end consumer and “this rather uninteresting thing we’re all selling called insurance.” He later stepped into operations roles with BGL and after helping to set up Beagle Street, the direct life insurance proposition, made the move to TCP LifeSystems which was subsequently acquired by iPipeline. Eight years later at iPipeline, Chris now looks after all UK and European clients from an implementation, sales and new business perspective.

The conversation moves onto the role of digital within the protection sale. Chris believes that digital enables accessibility: “It’s an enabler, it is no more”. When it comes to reaching the underserved, mass, or “low-value” markets, digital is key in delivering direct-to-consumer (D2C) propositions, but Chris questions why the industry believes that “D2C needs simplified products”, relying on the assumption that consumers won’t understand the full comprehensive insurance offerings: “Direct to consumer is seen as an inferior access to the cover people need and it gets denigrated.”

Chris explains that he’d like to see a shift away from the ‘all-or-nothing’ mentality when it comes to protection. The desire to serve only the best “gold-plated cover”, ensuring full protection of all needs – which clearly delivers the best outcome for many - but leaves a huge proportion of the population excluded from the conversation because they simply can't afford that gold-plated protection. For Chris, “some cover is better than no cover”. He wonders how, as an industry, we can make it more appealing for advisers to speak to this end of the market: “Why is it that we can’t make selling a £10 a month policy profitable for an advised piece of business?” But as things stand today, Chris believes that there should be some acknowledgement that “we can co-exist together” – D2C and advised distribution should work together and address the different needs within the market.

For Chris, it’s not about simplification of propositions to reflect separate sales channel, it’s about choice and delivering the ability for consumers to self-serve where it’s desired. It’s about empowering the consumer, giving them flexibility and options. It’s about offering a protection policy that flexes as a consumer moves through different life stages - reflecting the modern way of living.

So, what’s held us back as an industry in delivering this? In Chris’s opinion, it’s fear of change: “Can we afford to be different and get this wrong?” Of course, these are long-term insurance contracts and to do things differently presents risks in terms of mix of business and assumptions made, which Chris believes has encouraged formation of a more conservative approach, and as a result, sadly many innovations have died when arguably they shouldn’t have.

A special thanks to iPipeline for their ongoing support of the Risky Mix and partnering with us to help make the financial services industry more inclusive.