"Life Insurance is a very personal product, and I think the traditional method of putting people into buckets based of conditions is quite old-school."
- David Packman, Chief Growth Officer at Blueberry Life
Last month, Bluezone Insurance announced its official rebrand to Blueberry Life, accompanied by the launch of its expanded Life Insurance offering to support more chronic health conditions. “The new Blueberry Life brand speaks to our mission of improving health span by delivering precision healthcare through insurance,” explained Dr Karan Mehta, Founder & CEO of Blueberry Life.
This rebrand follows its most recent strategic partnership with LifeSearch, to give customers outside of its current product parameters the opportunity to access advice for their specific needs. Debbie Kennedy, CEO of LifeSearch, stressed that “Millions of people in the UK suffer from chronic conditions. Many don’t find it easy to access much-needed protection, and some just don’t bother because they fear they’ll be declined. They deserve better products and stronger support from our industry.”
READ MORE: LifeSearch partners with Bluezone Insurance to help protect more people with chronic conditions
Speaking exclusively with Protection Reporter, David Packman, Chief Growth Officer at Blueberry Life, explained that he joined the team roughly two and a half years ago: “I worked with Karan many years ago at Babylon Health, he actually pitched the idea of Bluezone (now Blueberry Life) to me back then and we thought it’d be great one day.
“He originally got the idea from his uncle; he had Type 2 Diabetes and was trying to get Life Insurance at the time. He had a really poor end-to-end experience trying to get insured, found the onboarding experience incredibly clunky.”
David explained “If you want to get Life Insurance in the UK traditionally and you have a chronic condition like Type 2 Diabetes, you’ll probably have to go through an online journey with an adviser, answer a million questions about your health, and get an indicative quote. That’s not a final quote, it’s called a quick quote.
“It’s a little bit deceptive because as you click through as a customer, you think this is where your premium will be but then the provider will say it needs more information to understand your true risk.
“This might be in the form of GP reports which, considering healthcare professionals are wildly overworked, can take months to obtain. We spoke to a few customers who’d waited two to three months to get a GP report, sometimes longer. Then some providers require medical tests,” he said.
“The whole onboarding experience has room for improvement, so we decided to come at Life Insurance from a first principles approach.”
In 2023, Blueberry Life launched its Life Insurance offering for customers with Type 2 Diabetes in the UK, removing the need for lengthy forms and mandatory medical appointments. To facilitate its offering, Blueberry Life came to market with Covéa Life, now Shepherds Friendly, and Gen Re. This product is the first of a portfolio of policies in the pipeline.
“For our onboarding process, we started with a finger prick blood test before customers could receive a final quote. This reduced the process to three days, which compared to three months was a huge improvement,” David recounted, “but we felt that if we tried a bit harder, we could make the process instantaneous.”
In January 2024, Blueberry Life relaunched its onboarding process, allowing customers to complete an online journey in five minutes – with no GP report or medical tests required. David explained that once a customer is happy with their final quote, “they can customise it by adjusting the cover, term amount, level, or decreasing, then enter payment details before their cover goes live.”
“This is a huge improvement on some of the traditional players out there trying to insure those with chronic conditions.”
Discussing why Life Insurance was the right product to launch, David said “With Life Insurance we have a term of five to forty years, so it’s a big opportunity to work with our customers; traditionally, there’s no interaction between the provider and customer – you go through this whole process then there’s no engagement unless annual statements are sent.
“We wanted to flip that on its head and take a first principles approach from the onboarding process, pricing, and then after the policy is in place. Since we’ve got a fair amount of data on our customers, we have an accurate picture of their health. This helps us with pricing, but also means we can work with our customers to build better lifestyles,” he added.
David said: “Those that do improve their health, we want to reward that by reducing premiums. We can’t do this today, but we’re working with our partners to do this. We’re currently working with Gro Health which is a lifestyle app specially for conditions like Type 2 Diabetes.”
“Our vision is to build our own lifestyle app and engage with policyholders to help them live healthier lives. The end goal is to have a fully dynamic product, if you can improve your health then your premium will come down.”
This app will offer clear information, tools, and resources to help individuals understand, track, and manage their health, creating a comprehensive ecosystem of support that goes beyond the traditional insurance model. However, as David pointed out, “it’s such a regulated industry so we have some stepping stones before we can get there. Firstly, we’re launching an app then very soon we’re going to launch the ability for customers to re-underwrite themselves to, hopefully, reduce their premium.”
He believes that customers aren’t aware that they could be insured because they’ve been “labelled with a condition so they assume they won’t have access to Life Insurance or that it’ll be too expensive. If you take the whole population, there’s a very big difference between someone who has well-managed diabetes versus unmanaged diabetes. It’s not fair on those people looking after their health to get priced with those that aren’t leading a healthy lifestyle.”
“It’s all about making Life Insurance fairer for customers.”
David went on to discuss his thoughts on accessibility and how customers can be put off if they don’t understand the premium breakdown. “If someone were to ask why their premium was so expensive, there’s often not enough clarity on how you’re priced. We break down the monthly premium, making note of factors that customers can’t change such as family history and modifiable health risks including lifestyle & activity levels,” he explained.
David said: “What we will be able to do is price a customer at say £50 per month, but if their health improves, we can reduce the premium from x to y – we will show them how their premium is broken down and how far they can reduce it depending on their health.”
“I think that kind of clarity behind how we set prices has helped to build trust. I think that’s something missing in the industry at the moment.”
As previously mentioned, Blueberry Life’s rebrand was accompanied by the launch of its expanded Life Insurance offering to support more chronic health conditions. “Over the last decade, the prevalence of chronic conditions has skyrocketed but protection has been quite flat, so there’s now an emerging protection gap amongst individuals with chronic conditions because there aren’t enough suppliers or they can’t find the right price,” David stressed, “they’ve been a little forgotten.”
This evolution of Blueberry Life’s products means it can now serve customers with pre-diabetes, “people might not even know they’ve got pre-diabetes unless they’ve spoken to their GP. I think companies are guilty of looking at diabetics, noticing Type 2 Diabetes makes up 90% of this demographic so that’s an easy audience to reach, but we need to move away from looking at customers based on condition types.”
“Do you think the industry has been overly focused on the traditional insurance model?”
David believes the industry is too focused on standard lives, “Obviously there are providers that offer insurance for specific chronic conditions but it’s not easy.” He thought the traditional players often have poorly designed journeys that don’t use the latest technology or simplified jargon. “I truly believe that nobody has made a concerted effort to serve those with chronic conditions, more of an afterthought,” David concluded.
