‘Successful' insurers and advisers will start to integrate private medical insurance (PMI) and protection to respond to changing customer needs, PruHealth has argued.
Speaking at The Protection Review conference, Dave Priestley, sales director at PruHealth said there was "significant overlap" in the type of clients buying both protection and PMI products, and from a health and wellness perspective, the products are inter-dependent.
He said: "We would argue the successful insurers and advisers into the future will be thinking more about how they satisfy that entire continuum in a joined-up way. I don't think there will be health specialists or protection specialists to the same degree as there are today.
"Products will start to reflect that change. Insurers will start to develop products that operate across that entire range. Whether it's fully integrated products, or whether its modular products that allow people to pick and mix what insurance they like, insurers will start to develop both products because customer needs will demand it."
Priestley believed this would give advisers the opportunity to further differentiate themselves and give more value to customers.
He also said the fact the industry did not do this at the moment was a self-imposed "constraint."
"What we've done as two industries is create a self-determining constraint. There are no external customer reasons why we've created those dividing lines. We've designed products that are separate and have advice processes that are [different.] As an industry we've imposed those constraints upon ourselves and as a result we don't typically talk to a customer across that entire spectrum of [health and protection] needs."
However, Brian Walters, principal of Regency Health said: "As a small brokerage, we concluded the disciplines [of PMI and protection] are best kept separate.
"From an advisory perspective, there's not a lot of crossover between PMI and protection. It certainly wouldn't be possible for us advise on protection without creating a whole new advisory process."
