"Joining the Disability Confident Employer scheme was an obvious choice for the partnership, and we hope that our involvement will contribute to meaningful and tangible changes across the financial services industry, helping to positively change attitudes, behaviours, and cultures with regards to disability."
These words were echoed by Andrew Parker, head of people and culture at Lifesearch: “We have always been committed to giving everyone opportunities; whatever their walk of life and whatever their life experience.
"Becoming a Disability Confident employer felt like a natural next step to give us a measurable programme to hold ourselves accountable against. The opportunity to learn from other organisations and share our own successes feels like a great way to grow the work and reach of Disability Confident”.
Of course, not all disabilities are visible (in fact most are not) – and the renewed focus on mental health and willingness to talk about it will be a positive benefit from the past two years.
Another positive to be found in the tough environment of the past 12 months was the founding of the Group for Autism, Insurance, Investment and Neurodivesity. It is an organisation designed to explore and promote the opportunities and benefits from employing a neurodiverse workforce within the insurance, investment and related financial services industry.
Underwriting and data
This is the third key strand of work on access to insurance, and perhaps the most challenging.
Data represents one of the biggest opportunities companies have to serve their customers and grow their business, and this clearly includes protection insurance. The question is whether we can do so in a way that offers tangible consumer benefits without creating attendant harms, including limitations on access to insurance.
In a life-protection context, there are plenty of areas where algorithms can help. Customers, advisers and insurers waste time and money in NPWs – the cases that are Not Proceeded With. Analytics should help.
For those online journeys, where do customers drop out, how can we intervene at just the right time and help them out? Can we reduce questions that are not adding value? What are the events that matter to customers and how can we better communicate at the right time throughout the life of their policy?
Even more positively, data can be used to understand someone's health, and create proactive and preventative interventions.
One of the dangers we face, with more data on more people being available and clever algorithms being used to manipulate that data, is whether we end up effectively excluding more and more.
Solutions here are not quick or easy, but more immediately it is encouraging to see the work that the Association of British Insurers is doing in looking to accelerate access to medical records.
