SINGAPORE (Nov 12): On Oct 18, Prudential Singapore held a town hall, during which it encouraged its employees to sign up for the PRUedge Challenge, which started on Nov 1. PRUedge is a health and wellness platform available only to Prudential employees at this point. It is able to measure the waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) accurately.
According to the World Health Organization, a healthy WHR should be 0.9 or less in men, and 0.85 or less in women. A WHR of 1 or more increases the risk for heart disease and other conditions that are linked to being overweight. The consensus view among medical professionals is that the WHR is a better indication of health than body mass index. A campaign to lower employees’ WHR may be just what the doctor ordered.
Through the PRUedge mobile app, a user can create an avatar of himself by taking photographs of his silhouette and front view. To get an accurate reading, the avatar needs the user’s clothes to be fitting, like gym wear. PRUedge then calculates the WHR from the images taken. A prize of $500,000 is available for employees who collectively participate in lowering their WHR over a period of three months. PRUedge will eventually be rolled out to customers.
In addition to measuring WHR, PRUedge also allows users to track steps, sleep, stress and take part in challenges to stay active. Prudential Singapore’s initiatives tie in with those of the Health Promotion Board of getting Singaporeans to exercise more with its National Steps Challenge Season Four programme, encouraging citizens and permanent residents to clock at least 10,000 steps a day. Earlier this year, the insurer commissioned the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) to publish a report, Ready for 100 in Singapore? Preparing for Longevity. In Singapore, the number of those aged over 65 is expected to reach 900,000 by 2030, and a rising number are living to 100, the report says. This poses challenges to the government, healthcare services and finances. The report suggests that people in Singapore need to build strength in four key areas of life — supportive relationships, health and wellness, financial stability and work.
“Our purpose is innovating to help people live well. Everyone is living longer and we want them to live well,” says Wilf Blackburn, CEO of Prudential Singapore.
Rethinking insurance
Singapore’s changing demographics — older for longer — have led to a change of focus at Prudential. As life expectancy in Singapore continues to rise, Prudential is giving its employees the option to work beyond the statutory retirement age of 62.
Prudential’s new retirement policy, which came into effect on Oct 1, was introduced on the back of the insurer’s “Ready for 100 in Singapore” initiative. Currently, Prudential has six employees aged 62 and above who are eligible for re-employment in the next five years. With the lifting of the retirement age, they can stay on in their jobs and be entitled to the same benefits, including medical, as all employees while drawing the same salary as before. They will still receive a retirement payout any time they choose to leave their jobs, Prudential has said in a statement.
“We’re encouraging people not to think about the three stages of life (studying, working, retiring). Some of our staff are taking sabbaticals, and coming back. One of the things we did was we removed the retirement age completely so our staff aren’t obliged to retire at 62. As long as they perform, they can stay as long as they like,” Blackburn says.
It is increasingly probable that teenagers and those in their early 20s today will live to 100, so they should be prepared for it. “When my children were growing up, I used to tell them they could live to 120 and they should plan their life accordingly. Recharging, work at different times, take longer breaks,” Blackburn elaborates. “I am hoping together we can persuade more people to adjust to this new paradigm of living a long time and living a different way. We will be showcasing at the Singapore FinTech Festival how we are using technology to help people live longer and better.”
One way to prepare for longevity is to make health coverage and savings plans more flexible. In September, Prudential launched PRUactive Saver policy after reviewing customer feedback. It allows customers to tailor their policy to meet their financial goals and commitments. Customers can determine the duration of their policy and the payment period for their premiums to complement their financial planning. The feedback showed that customers wanted the ability to customise the policy term and premium payment term based on individual financial needs. These customers also articulated that retirement, children’s education and protection against job loss were the three key reasons they saved.
“We’ve redesigned our savings plans. We used to have one size fits all, where customers can save for 10 or 20 years. Now people have different goals and different timelines, so our savings plans are super flexible. You can choose exactly how many years you want to save for. It’s like a made-to-measure approach to savings to fit in with this multi-stage life concept,” Blackburn says.
Another challenge for insurers is keeping health insurance cover costs low. Costs have been rising, partly because people in general have been making more claims, including for minor ailments. The rising cost of health insurance cover and medical insurance is a concern that has been raised by both insurers and the government.
To encourage customers to lead a healthier lifestyle and be more prudent in the use of medical services, Prudential has introduced claims-based pricing. “We’ve found that claims-based pricing shows early signs of positive outcomes, so more than 80% of our customers are getting a 20% discount on renewal premiums for their private hospital [integrated shield plan PRUshield] rider,” Blackburn says.
Staying healthy and removing or mitigating the need to claim is probably the best way to curb medical inflation.
Digitally transformed
In an age in which goods and services are available online, Blackburn says Prudential is investing significantly in digital technologies to enable its financial consultants to serve customers better.
He says, “We’ve been digitally enabling our 5,000 financial consultants with tools that help them better engage our customers and work smarter. However, even the best technology cannot replace the human touch of our financial consultants. We believe most people would want to talk to somebody before making big financial investments, whether it’s to save for their retirement or for their children’s education. These are long-term commitments and people don’t want to commit 10% of their salary without seeking advice.”
According to him, Prudential’s financial consultants have iPads with programmes that allow them to do needs analysis, factfind and do everything in a hi-tech way for customers. Prudential is also engaging with other companies, such as DirectAsia, to encourage their customers to visit Prudential’s digital platform, where they can do online research and make a purchase. “Our digital platform was developed to give customers greater convenience and more options for how they want to engage with us. We’ve had our online portal for 1½ years and we found most customers still want to talk to a financial consultant before making a purchase,” Blackburn says. “Even though Singaporeans are very sophisticated and financially literate, they don’t want to make investment decisions on their own. We‘ve seen this in other markets as well.”
He adds that the price of Prudential plans is the same whether customers buy online or go with an adviser.
Adopting AI-driven medtech and healthtech
Prudential is moving away from an insurer’s traditional role of collecting a premium and paying for treatment when a person falls sick. It is investing in preventive healthcare to help customers detect diseases early, intervening at the right time and promoting healthy living. Prudential will be introducing initiatives to help its customers stay healthy.
”Much of our work [this year] is in the medtech and healthtech space,” Blackburn says. For instance, Prudential recently signed an exclusive regional partnership with a UK company called Babylon Health, which has one of the world’s most sophisticated artificial intelligence-powered health platforms.
Babylon Health leverages off AI and provides a healthcare system that is preventive rather than reactionary, as AI can be used to collect, compile and analyse data. Babylon’s symptom checker AI helps people determine whether they need to see a doctor and supports them with the discussion they need to have with their doctor as well as recording and logging of symptoms and any pre-existing conditions.
Babylon’s AI technology feeds off large volumes of data from patients and the medical community, and continual learning from users and through feedback from the company’s own experts. Babylon’s AI bot has been trained by data scientists and medical professionals to identify symptoms and associated disease conditions and provide medical information in real-time. The bot will ask questions and respond to answers, and even connect the customer to a doctor if required.
“You can talk to your doctor without leaving your home and, potentially, even get your medicines delivered to your home,” Blackburn says.
Through Babylon, Prudential will be offering customers in up to 12 markets in Asia around-the-clock access to a comprehensive set of digital health tools that will complement its existing suite of protection products.
In Singapore, Babylon Health will provide a health-risk assessment, symptom checker and pre-diagnosis tool to help users be well informed about their health situation and illnesses, if any, so that they are better equipped to manage their health. In addition, Prudential is offering new health solutions — WellteQ, MyFiziq and DocDoc — to its small and medium-sized enterprise customers as part of a pilot programme. These services complement its suite of protection products and will be offered as a holistic package.
Also for SMEs, an integrated platform, PRUworks, offers wellness and business solutions to manage employee benefits. PRUwork provides easy
access for employees to make claims via an e-claims portal, track claims and get 24/7 access to coverage details. Blackburn says: “We are working on PRUworks with SMEs. In addition to the insurance coverage for their staff, we are offering wellness and business services, which their employees can also benefit from.
“PRUworks goes beyond providing insurance plans, to helping employers help their employees to be much healthier. It’s good for us because we get fewer claims. If people are living longer, they are customers for longer.”
Soon, Prudential will be using AI to make assessment decisions on medical outpatient claims, and reduce the overall time taken for instant processing of claims. Normally, claims assessment would take seven business days. Instead of having to submit a paper bill, all claimants have to do is upload a soft copy of the hospital bills online. The outcome of the claims assessment will be sent to the customer in an hour.
In August, Prudential announced the second edition of its digital innovation programme, the PRU Fintegrate Partnership, which is now open to global fintechs. This year, the insurer has identified opportunities for collaboration in areas such as preventive healthcare, enterprise solutions, customer engagement and underwriting.
“We see tremendous untapped opportunities to innovate with the right partners in a number of areas, for example, by using technology to improve preventive healthcare and provide community support for customers with pre-existing conditions,” Blackburn says.
Launched in 2017, PRU Fintegrate aims to build an ecosystem of partners from the fintech, insurtech, healthtech and medtech communities to help solve business challenges with creative solutions. Prudential’s team of experts will work with selected PRU Fintegrate finalists to help them enhance their value proposition and develop their proof-of-concept.
“Singapore is used as a test bed for many solutions. The enterprise solution [PRUworks] that we developed here, for example, is now being rolled out in Asia. Because Singapore is such fertile ground for fintech, healthtech and medtech, many of the fintech start-ups like to be based here and it’s become a hub of sorts for fintech,” Blackburn says.
Prudential has a presence in almost all of the countries in Asean. “Many of the needs of customers are the same everywhere; they want to save for their children’s education, for health and for retirement,” Blackburn says.
Digitalisation is likely to continue unabated, he reckons. “The pace of digitalisation is getting faster and faster. Fortunately, we’re growing and we’ve been able to rescale, reskill and retrain our people. The more mundane work is done by robots, so our people are able to do the higher-value work.”
And, yes, technology integrated in PRUedge will play an increasing role in encouraging people to lead healthier lives. Blackburn says he is ready to take the PRUedge Challenge, but it could be an uphill struggle to get his avatar into the WHO stipulated 0.9 range for his WHR.
