After three successful years’ tele-interviewing in the UK and Ireland, MorganAsh has expanded into mainland Europe in Germany.
Canada Life Europe is one of the first life insurers to offer full tele-interviewing for its applicants in Germany. After a successful pilot on the critical illness product in 2007, Canada Life Europe, based in Dublin, Ireland, will roll out full tele-interviewing across all products and all distribution channels throughout 2008.
“Tele-underwriting almost halved the turnaround time from application to policy issue,” says Günther Soboll, principal representative of Canada Life Europe in Germany. Tele-interviews gather the information in real-time in a simple process compared to multiple pages of paper questionnaires. The quality of the information is markedly improved. “There is no doubt which information is required – and possible additional queries can be asked and clarified right there and then,” says Soboll.
Brokers benefit from reduced administration time. Sensitive questions relating to the client’s health are answered in the telephone interview, reducing the broker’s liability for the accuracy and completeness of health-related disclosures.
MorganAsh worked with Canada Life and SCOR Global Life in Cologne in developing the tele-interview service for the German market. “SCOR has provided us with advice and guidance on adapting the tele-interviewing process for the German market, as well as obtaining legal advice on the past and recent insurance law,” commented Andrea Sparrow, MorganAsh’s manager for Germany. “SCOR undertook the quality assurance on our initial interviews, which also gave them unparalleled experience in tele-interviewing that they can now bring to their clients.”
“The pilot in 2007 was a great success,” says Andrew Gething, managing director of MorganAsh. “We had a great partnership with Canada Life and SCOR and we quickly adapted our unique nurse tele-interview service for the German market. We undertook interviews from both the UK and Germany for the pilot, although in the future all interviews will be undertaken in Germany. We have always designed our systems to be scalable and multilingual. I was delighted when after a few days of setting up we logged on in Germany and started interviewing, with all interviews recorded and indexed as in the UK.”
The differences in tele-interviewing between the UK, Ireland and Germany are few. The main difference is in the length of the interviews due to a more verbose German language. Otherwise all the benefits of reduced application time, improved information and reduced non-disclosure are the same as experienced in the UK and Ireland.
The timing could not be better. New insurance law is introduced from 1 January 2008. Known as the VVG Reform, the changes in law are similar to those being introduced by the FCA, FOS and Law Commission in the UK. Greater responsibility for collecting information on an applicant’s medical history now rests with the insurer and broker. “The reform of the European Union Insurance Intermediaries Directive increases the liability of the broker if they continue to collect the medical information. The change of the insurance contract law (VVG Reform) restricts the consequences in case of non-disclosure within five years. Also, the insured could demand in this case consumer friendliness retroactive premium adjustment,” commented Thomas Bornemann of SCOR Global Life.