PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

A fa­mil­iar name has thrown its hat in­to the ring of the lo­cal in­sur­ance mar­ket, and they are tar­get­ing mem­bers of the pub­lic who may be­lieve in­sur­ance is out of their reach.

In 2021, in the midst of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic, Re­pub­lic Fi­nan­cial Hold­ings Ltd es­tab­lished a new sub­sidiary; Re­pub­lic Life In­sur­ance Com­pa­ny (RLIC).

While the new en­ti­ty was one of Re­pub­lic’s re­silience strate­gies amid eco­nom­ic chal­lenges cre­at­ed by the pan­dem­ic, RLIC was giv­en a spe­cif­ic man­date: to de­liv­er a suite of in­sur­ance prod­ucts that are ac­ces­si­ble, af­ford­able and easy to un­der­stand.

Man­ag­ing di­rec­tor of Re­pub­lic Life, Robert Sover­all, told the Busi­ness Guardian he felt much of the wider pub­lic had skewed views about in­sur­ance be­ing al­most a lux­u­ry item.

“I be­lieve that is one mis­con­cep­tion that we need to ad­dress, or the nar­ra­tive that we need to change, is that life in­sur­ance has been seen to be dis­cre­tionary spend­ing and pri­mar­i­ly for high-in­come earn­ers,” said Sover­all, “We be­lieve that is not so. Life in­sur­ance is prob­a­bly more im­por­tant to low­er in­come earn­ers be­cause when un­for­tu­nate cir­cum­stances hap­pen their fam­i­lies would be the ones im­pact­ed more than high in­come earn­ers.”

He ex­plained fur­ther, ‘When the pri­ma­ry bread­win­ner of a mid­dle-or low­er-in­come fam­i­ly pass­es on, very of­ten they may not have the sav­ings and in our view, their fam­i­lies may be more in­con­ve­nienced or suf­fer fi­nan­cial hard­ships. So, life in­sur­ance is prob­a­bly more im­por­tant to low­er-and mid­dle-in­come earn­ers than high­er-in­come earn­ers. “

Sover­all felt that this was com­pound­ed by the tra­di­tion­al ap­proach to sell­ing in­sur­ance, which seemed to cre­ate sev­er­al bar­ri­ers to en­try for a ser­vice that should be con­sid­ered a ne­ces­si­ty.

“Tra­di­tion­al­ly, life in­sur­ance is sold through face-to-face in­ter­ac­tions with a com­mis­sion-based HR (struc­ture). For that rea­son, in­sur­ance tend­ed to be pri­mar­i­ly sold to the high­er in­come earn­ers be­cause agents are paid based on com­mis­sions and we be­lieve that there is a huge seg­ment of the mar­ket that has been ne­glect­ed in mid­dle and low­er-in­come earn­ers and prob­a­bly unin­sured or un­der­in­sured, “ said Sover­all, “I be­lieve it is be­cause of how in­sur­ance is sold, that those per­sons were the ones that agents tend­ed to so­lic­it for busi­ness, but it is in my view, and it is a wide­ly held view, that life in­sur­ance should be part of any fi­nan­cial plan.”

How­ev­er, Re­pub­lic still need­ed to find a way to in­crease the ac­ces­si­bil­i­ty of in­sur­ance, and af­ter en­gag­ing the pub­lic, RLIC found an an­swer through a dig­i­tal ap­proach.

“We chose dig­i­tal life in­sur­ance and to get there we did a cou­ple fo­cus groups across dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tional co­horts,” said Sab­ri­na Nath, man­ag­er of IT & Busi­ness De­vel­op­ment at RLIC. “One thing that was very com­mon across all of the dif­fer­ent age groups is what peo­ple want­ed from life in­sur­ance; speed, ease of ac­cess, and con­ve­nience. It’s sim­ple and very trans­par­ent in­for­ma­tion.”

Nath ex­plained this dig­i­tal ap­proach had par­tic­u­lar­ly im­pressed younger ap­pli­cants. That as well as the quick shar­ing of per­ti­nent in­for­ma­tion con­cern­ing the po­ten­tial poli­cies, set RLIC’s prod­uct apart from its com­peti­tors.

“Our cus­tomers are al­lowed to go on­to our web­site, com­plete a quick quote with­in I would say, one-and-a-half min­utes time and once they are sat­is­fied with the quote that is be­fore them, they are tak­en in­to the full quote jour­ney,” said Nath, who ex­plained that this en­tire process can be com­plet­ed with­out the po­ten­tial cus­tomer ever in­ter­act­ing with a live agent.

To fa­cil­i­tate the ap­pli­ca­tion, cus­tomers need on­ly fill out a ques­tion­naire and sub­mit a pho­to­graph via face recog­ni­tion tech­nol­o­gy not dis­sim­i­lar to game face tech­nol­o­gy used to cre­ate dig­i­tal avatars as has been pop­u­larised in sports games on video game con­soles.

“They an­swer a cou­ple of med­ical ques­tions, per­son­al da­ta ques­tions and then they do fa­cial recog­ni­tion. I think that is our dif­fer­en­ti­at­ing fac­tor from oth­er in­sur­ance com­pa­nies. The cus­tomer up­loads their ID and they do fa­cial recog­ni­tion. They up­load a util­i­ty bill, and pay­ment can be done via a cred­it card or any bank ac­count with­in Trinidad and To­ba­go. That en­tire process can be done with­in 10 min­utes and the cus­tomer’s pol­i­cy is is­sued.”

How­ev­er while the ap­pli­ca­tion process is sim­pli­fied, there are still lev­els of ver­i­fi­ca­tion that would be re­quired for pol­i­cy­hold­ers that would be done sub­se­quent­ly.

When RLIC of­fi­cial­ly start­ed its op­er­a­tions in Jan­u­ary 2022, the com­pa­ny ini­tial­ly of­fered cred­i­tor’s life in­sur­ance on re­tail loans and mort­gages. In Feb­ru­ary 2022, Cred­it Card Bal­ance Cov­er was launched. In April 2022, the Sin­gle Pre­mi­um Im­me­di­ate An­nu­ity (SPIA) was launched to the pub­lic.

How­ev­er, the com­pa­ny is now push­ing two life in­sur­ance op­tions; Term To 100 which is billed as the cheap­est and sim­plest form of life in­sur­ance.

“It will pro­vide your loved ones with a cash lump sum tax-free and will help them pay for a mort­gage or any out­stand­ing debts, ed­u­ca­tion­al ex­pens­es or just gen­er­al liv­ing ex­pens­es so that they can main­tain the stan­dard of liv­ing that they are ac­cus­tomed to when you’re alive. As I said, this is life­time cov­er­age at a fixed pre­mi­um rate. So what that means is whether you live to age 85 or 105, you’re still in­sured for the full cov­er­age amount,” ex­plained Ji­hann Miller RLIC’s man­ag­er, Ac­tu­ar­i­al, Prod­uct De­vel­op­ment, Mar­ket­ing & Sales.

Miller ex­plained that the sec­ond op­tion, Whole Life is per­ma­nent life in­sur­ance that al­so pro­vides the pol­i­cy­hold­er with in­come sav­ings op­tion.

“It has an in­vest­ment or sav­ings com­po­nent. And what that means is over time, over the life of your pol­i­cy, it ac­cu­mu­lates a cash val­ue at a guar­an­teed rate of 4 per cent per an­num. So that’s guar­an­teed. That’s not pro­ject­ed. You’re guar­an­teed a good re­turn on your in­vest­ment. So that’s the best part of the Whole Life. So you’re get­ting cov­ered while sav­ing,” said Miller.

RLIC poli­cies on­ly of­fer max­i­mum cov­er­age of $750,000 which is sig­nif­i­cant­ly less than what is of­fered by oth­er, more es­tab­lished, in­sur­ance com­pa­nies in the mar­ket. How­ev­er Sover­all ex­plained with pre­mi­um po­ten­tial­ly be­ing as low as $48 a month or as he stat­ed, “ a month­ly box of KFC” it does of­fer the every­man a chance to se­cure life in­sur­ance.

As for those who may be scep­ti­cal about in­sur­ance, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the wake of Cli­co’s col­lapse in 2009, Sover­all not­ed that RLIC had more than a fa­mil­iar name to call up­on.

“Re­pub­lic Bank has been op­er­at­ing for about 190 years now. We have the con­fi­dence and trust of our cus­tomers. We are now ex­tend­ing our fi­nan­cial ser­vices prod­ucts in­to life in­sur­ance. We have proven that we man­age our busi­ness in a very pru­dent and con­ser­v­a­tive man­ner and I think with the trust and con­fi­dence that of our cus­tomers, all of us will con­tin­ue with the life in­sur­ance,” said Sover­all.

About RFHL

Re­pub­lic Fi­nan­cial Hold­ings Lim­it­ed (RFHL) op­er­ates bank­ing op­er­a­tions in 14 ju­ris­dic­tion across the Caribbean, South Amer­i­ca as well as the African con­ti­nent through Re­pub­lic Bank Ghana. In its 2023 fi­nan­cial year, RFHL record­ed af­ter-tax prof­it of $1.93 bil­lion (US$284 mil­lion) and to­tal as­sets of $112.92 bil­lion (US$16.60 bil­lion).