Following the management buy-out of Royal & Sun Alliance's healthcare and assistance division, Angela Faherty talks to Tim Ablett, chief executive of new health insurer FirstAssist
Tim Ablett is excited about the future. As chief executive of FirstAssist, he and managing director Steve Wood have plans to turn the corporate insurance market on its head and shake up the healthcare industry.
Ablett and Wood have been running FirstAssist since May this year following a management buy-out from Royal & SunAlliance (RSA). Both have a solid background in insurance and the healthcare sector in particular holds fond memories for Ablett.
'In 1998, I sat on a strategic working party which focused on the healthcare arena and I realised that RSA was in a number of healthcare markets such as private medical insurance (PMI) and personal accident, but that they were all in separate divisions. I took the decision to bring them all into a single division and create a new business out of it. That became Healthcare & Assistance,' he says.
After being so actively involved in its establishment as well as heading up the company for three years, it is little wonder Ablett was determined the buy-out of FirstAssist would succeed. After a failed attempt to buy Groupama's UK business in 2001 following the insurer's decision not to sell, Ablett was determined to see one deal through to the end.
'I had my appetite whetted by attempting the Groupama management buy-out, by taking it to the church if not to the altar,' he says.
Ablett says FirstAssist's holistic approach to rehabilitation and group risk will make it stand out from other industry players. He adds that rising employee absence and sickness figures need to be addressed and that FirstAssist hopes to play a key role in helping companies tackle this problem.
'FirstAssist is all about protection, wellbeing and helping individuals and companies. That is where we see FirstAssist differentiating itself from other straightforward PMI insurers. As well as being a PMI insurer, a general accident insurer and cash plan provider, we see potential in the market to focus in on the employee risk within organisations.'
'At the moment, PMI is seen as an employee benefit for the 10% top echelon of staff, whereas the employee risk is in the 90% of staff without cover. Those are the ones we should focus on in terms of wellbeing and getting them back to work,' he says.
Ablett says while helping employees get back to work will help to lower costs, assisting the company take a more preventative approach to sickness and injury absence in the first place is key.
'Helping companies prevent sickness absence means getting to the root causes. It means providing companies, particularly SMEs with broader health and safety advice and to understand why people are off ill. Is it stress, lighting or posture? What injuries are caused at work? We need to help firms prevent sickness absence and at the same time, get those who are off work access to primary care quicker,' he says.
One of the main problems in the healthcare sector, says Ablett, is that products have dedicated customer bases which minimises sales opportunities, a matter he believes FirstAssist can address.
'At the moment, we have customer groups that buy PMI, those who buy personal accident and those who buy cash plans. What we don't do is sell all of those services to all of our customers. We tend to be silo driven. So, we need to turn the model around and allow customers to access all of these products, whichever ones are suitable to them,' he says.
'One of the difficulties with insurance is that, because of its nature, there will always be things that are not covered, and the last thing you want to hear when you come to make a claim is that you are not covered. But if you can offer access to a network or range of other services for an additional fee, it takes the consumer's concern away.'
Ablett adds that there are no plans to penetrate the market through a huge media campaign and says the company will continue to sell through intermediaries.
'We have no intention of becoming a direct insurer. We are very much a business-to-business organisation,' he says.
As well as these plans to alter the face of the healthcare industry, Ablett thinks the insurance environment has to change. He feels the market is too sterile and believes insurers should be looking at ways to grow business, rather than eliminate the opposition.
'One of the things that disappoints me about the insurance industry enormously is how one insurer takes business away from another insurer and it just moves around the marketplace. That is such a sterile business model,' he says.
'Our number one business objective is certainly not to just take business away from the likes of BUPA and AXA PPP healthcare. We want to grow the market by getting to those people who have not got healthcare products and those who have not had healthcare cover before. We are aiming at those companies who have never considered employee risk before and realised they have a rehabilitation issue.'
'Our focus is not on taking business off everyone else, that is far too sterile. FirstAssist will be doing the traditional things, but we will also be breaking new ground. The healthcare market has been flat for too long we now need to get the upturn in a whole range of services,' he says.
