Our commitment to our partners and customers remains unwavering

Welcome to our August edition of Adviser News. We are all working hard to keep COVID-19 under control, but in particular our thoughts are with our colleagues, partners and customers in Victoria.

We are reaching out to see how we can best support those impacted by Stage 4 lockdowns, and I urge you to reach out to your BDMs if you need support. We have resources available for you to use and a collection of articles and tools available to share with your staff and your customers. The Zurich and OnePath team are here for you if you need support.

We are also working with our partners at UHG to help any customers currently going through underwriting in the Melbourne metropolitan area, as mobile health screening services are not available. Your clients will have the option to attend a clinic or postpone until restrictions are lifted. Please speak to an underwriter or BDM for more details.

Across the Zurich and OnePath businesses we are seeing more customers claim on their policy every year¹. One reason is that Australians are living more active lifestyles which means we are engaging in activities that have potential high-risk consequences².

However, as we have seen recently during the Financial Services Council Life Insurance Summit, the biggest increase in claims aligns to one of Australia’s biggest and growing health burdens: Mental Health. Medically, we still know relatively little about mental health conditions³, although the statistics shows that 1 in 5 Australians will be affected by a mental health condition every year⁴.

These statistics provide challenges for all insurers, with the pressure on us to ensure our products stand up to the rigors and challenges facing modern society. A challenge we are proud to take on, now and into the future.

Below is a detailed breakdown of our claim statistics and some emotional video testimonials that speak to the heart of why we do what we do.

To combat these challenges, we have joined forces with our industry peers and key industry bodies to embark on research to understand what customers and the community expects of life insurance. It was undertaken by NMG on behalf of the “Choice and Access to Life Insurance” (CALI) group, which includes Zurich, OnePath, TAL, AIA, MLC, the AFA, FPA and FSC.

The research is heartening in many ways – it has many important key findings and shows Australians are very reasonable in their expectations of what life insurance is there to do and who should offer it.

A key finding of the research was while Australians’ see the value of life insurance, their expectations of how life insurance will support them through certain life stages does not match the reality of how we are insured. Underinsurance is rife, particularly amongst younger cohorts.

Just as COVID-19 has helped us re-assess and appreciate a more “back to basics” approach in our lives, there is a similar opportunity in life insurance. Affordability is a particularly paramount theme.  No matter what our circumstances, there is now a natural resistance to anything “gold plated.”

The research that Zurich and the CALI group commissioned provides us with a north star to understand what modern Australians want. We have provided a link here so you can read through this important research.