Zurich has joined other insurers trying to capitalise on the current health and wellness trend by launching an app that seeks to help new clients improve their physical and mental health and community involvement.
The LiveWell app would reward users who engaged in these three pillars of health with discounts on their life insurance, offering premium deductions based on the level of wellness reached in a year. Unlike other apps, this would be determined not just by physical exercise, but also through mental activities such as meditation, community volunteering, and reading up on health.
Zurich head of risk propositions, John Clark, believed that the app made the achievements required to receive certain discounts “challenging, but achievable”, saying that some competitors offered large discounts that were realistically only attainable by the top one per cent of participants.
He also noted that trend toward fitness tracking and wearable fitness devices “wasn’t a fad, [but] a trend that’s not going to stop” and that Australia was at the forefront of the movement, meaning it made sense for Zurich to have an offering in this space.
There was also evidence active clients (meaning those who take more than 5,000 steps per day) represented a lower claims risk, so insurers also stand to benefit from encouraging activity among insureds.
This tied into a growing focus on the wellness movement from insurers in Australia, with ratings houses now including health and wellbeing propositions within their product score ratings and adviser studies showing the importance of such offerings to clients. Indeed, Zurich was hoping the wellness trend would see one out of every three new clients take up use of the app.
Zurich utilised FitSense, a fitness technology provider it acquired last year, in its production of the app, which its co-founder and chief executive, Jan-Phillip Kruip, believed “provided something on top of all the fitness apps out there”.
Speaking at the app’s launch, Kruip said that it was the most comprehensive app in the market in that it interfaced with pretty much all the wearable fitness tracker apps available.
