"Customers could claim up to 1,000 days of hospitalisation for a condition, including if they’ve got a pre-existing condition because after 12 months we’ll cover sickness as well as accidents."
- Richard Horner, Head of Individual Protection at MetLife UK
After reviewing nearly 24k claims in 2023, MetLife UK has made significant enhancements to its EverydayProtect offering. Protection Reporter spoke with Richard Horner, Head of Individual Protection at MetLife UK, who was “happy and energised to see the changes were well received.”
“Our mission statement is protection made simple.”
“We’re not providing Life Insurance, Critical Illness (CI), or Income Protection (IP) in the same way as other insurers would. We’re providing a policy that can sit alongside those products, we talk about building a protection puzzle,” Richard explained.
Launched in October 2021, EverydayProtect was branded a “flexible and cost-effective protection policy tailored to suit the self-employed, families, and individuals with active lifestyles.” Designed for the day-to-day realities of family life with no health questions asked, five levels of cover units are available, starting at £10, depending on the individual’s – and their families' – specific lifestyle and needs.
MetLife UK has now increased EverydayProtect’s broken bones claim benefit by 25%, rising from £800 to £1k paid out per major bone and up to £250 per minor broken bone. The 90-day limit on hospitalisation has been removed and payouts for pregnancy-related complications that result in a hospital stay have been enhanced.
Considering almost 50% of customers have purchased its optional children’s cover, MetLife has made it so policies are active from the child’s birth, instead of six months old, running until their 23rd birthday. It has also added payouts for burns covering 5% of the body - previously 20%. Benefit amounts for non-accidental death and Total Permanent Disablement remain unchanged.
Previously, cycle and motorbike couriers/delivery riders were not able to claim for injuries while working. That exclusion has been removed, so these couriers have access to the full policy benefits. Meanwhile, Policy Terms & Conditions (T&Cs) have been redesigned and definitions have been simplified to improve customer understanding.
“When you take into account that 500k people are injured at work every year, half of all children will have broken a bone by the age of 18, there are 4mn self-employed people in the UK alone; we’re looking to provide a product that gives more people protection,” he said.
When asked whether EverydayProtect is a hybrid product, Richard said “I would buy into the word innovative. I think that’s what our products are, innovative […] over the last forty years, there haven’t been many new products launched to market. Although EverydayProtect has been around for the last decade in different guises, it’s still highly innovative.”
“Nobody is doing what we’re doing.”
“EverydayProtect is a product where customers in good health, qualify for Life Insurance and CI, look at it and think ‘oh, I’d like that’. We’ve designed it to compliment the market because there will always be customers who are self-employed, work in construction, have children – or with pre-existing conditions that make other options unaffordable or unavailable,” he continued.
Discussing customer age demographics, Richard highlighted “What makes the difference with our policies is it gets away from their optimism bias. If you’re selling Life Insurance to younger customers, they’re probably going to say they don’t need it. Whereas if you ask a group of people to stand up if they’ve ever broken a bone, spent 24 hours in hospital, got children who’ve broken a bone, 80% of people will stand up.”
“We provide a good entry point to protection, where people can easily understand it, it’s affordable, and they can actually see that they could claim on it.”
When asked whether there should be more of this kind of protection on the market, Richard said he’d like to see a range of products that could “stay with customers throughout their life. I would love to have someone claim on their parents’ ChildShield, and have such a great experience that when they turn 18, they buy EverydayProtect for themselves.”
“Because if you look at when people purchase protection, it’s at those significant moments: university, employment, renting, or buying a house,” he concluded.
