Munich, 28.08.2024. Private health insurers are registering stable membership figures for comprehensive insurance policies, combined with slight growth in the past year.* However, in order to continue to be successful, they must also be future-proof and recognise what tomorrow’s customers expect. Holger Teske, CEO and co-founder of Gini, explains the trends that will influence the business development of private health insurance companies.

Consistent digitalisation for strong customer loyalty

In addition to simplifying bureaucratic processes, ongoing digitalisation also offers insurance companies the opportunity to build closer customer relationships. Offering services and benefits that are consistently tailored to customer needs promotes policyholder satisfaction and ensures their loyalty. To achieve this, private health insurers ideally digitalise customer contact consistently. This allows policyholders to access information at any time and to easily get in touch with contact persons via any channel – by email, chat, social media or messenger. A well-developed app from the insurance provider that contains all relevant features is a good way to do this, especially for younger people who take it for granted. Solutions that make bureaucratic processes simpler and more convenient should also be integrated into the app – such as a fully digitalised car park for invoices, including a payment function, to increase usage and thus customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Expand additional services via app

As well as intensifying customer contact, a private health insurance app is also suitable for strengthening loyalty and providing a high quality of service on another level: as a source of information for other insurance products. As apps are now taken for granted by consumers, the expectations of providers are high and the demands for excellent usability are increasing ever faster. Policyholders are interested in being able to find out about other insurance policies quickly and easily, and ideally be able to buy them directly from the app. In a representative study** conducted by Yougov on behalf of Gini, a third (34.3%) of those with private health insurance rated the ability to purchase additional insurance policies in the app as valuable. For insurance companies, this is an opportunity to upsell and thus generate profitable additional business – while at the same time providing a positively perceived service by responding to customer wishes.

Focus on sustainability

Sustainability aspects are already important and will become even more so in the future. It is not only increasing legal requirements that define ESG criteria; consumers also expect companies to show a corresponding commitment and select services accordingly. The combination of the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) and the EU Taxonomy Regulation also obliges insurance companies to provide comprehensive reporting. This enables them to demonstrate how sustainably and ecologically they operate. As many companies are now committed to a climate-neutral investment and insurance portfolio by 2050, others will follow and insurance companies will need to position themselves accordingly in order to retain sustainably oriented policyholders.

Establish a substantial innovation management

The insurance industry is an established business sector that needs to keep innovating in order to remain relevant – this also applies to private health insurance companies. One key to this is a functioning innovation management system that tests product and service ideas in a structured manner and brings them to the market or to insurance customers. To do this, it is necessary to set up an appropriate infrastructure with teams, processes and responsibilities to find these ideas and drive them through the innovation funnel to implementation. This includes collaborations: InsureTechs, for example, offer innovative and customer-centered solutions that insurance companies themselves would not be able to develop so quickly and easily. As this is an area of both speed and precision, there is scope here to test innovations and implement them if they are successful. This is because they often create enormous added value for customers and services and make a decisive contribution to the success of insurance companies. Co-operations with companies thus form the basis for a permanent process structure for innovations and further developments.

Enhanced fraud prevention

In times of generative artificial intelligence and deepfakes, private health insurance companies are increasingly having to deal with fraud, which leads to high financial losses. Programmes and prompts make it possible to create fake medical bills and diagnoses that are increasingly difficult to detect and are illegally billed to the health insurance company. With the help of high-tech document analysis, which is quickly and highly available as a SaaS solution, for example, these cases of fraud can be made visible and detected more quickly. Private health insurance companies can integrate this into their systems – and thus prevent enormous losses that would have a negative impact on their balance sheets and, ultimately, also on insurance premiums.