Focus: Sustainability
in Life & Health

Life and health insurance plays a key role in Swiss Re’s vision of making the world more resilient. In 2021, Swiss Re had 186 million life and health policies in force and paid out USD 14 billion in claims and annuity payments. This means that 237 million family members were supported by life and health reinsurance policies. We are committed to developing the most innovative solutions for our clients and partners along the entire value chain.

However, the pandemic has stressed healthcare systems around the world. According to a recent sigma report published by Swiss Re Institute, mortality and health insurance protection gaps have widened since the start of the pandemic. More specifically, the global health protection gap grew by 8.1% to USD 747 billion in 2020. With lower health resilience, a less robust health infrastructure and high levels of out-of-pocket spending on healthcare, developing countries are especially vulnerable to crisis situations such as those created by COVID-19. Affordable health insurance can play a central role in enhancing protection and reducing the financial risks associated with healthcare crises.

Driving availability, accessibility and affordability of insurance products

With this in mind, we have reinforced our efforts to bring life and health insurance solutions to the millions of people that our industry does not yet adequately serve. Launched in early 2021, our new Swiss Re Life & Health Sustainability Initiative focuses on partnering with our clients to make life and health insurance more affordable, available and accessible to underserved populations, who represent a huge, untapped market for our business and our industry.

Addressing the specific needs of a community is essential. For this reason, we have decided to focus on groups that have generally been left out or left behind by the insurance industry. They include immigrants, women, LGBTQ+, ethnic and racial minorities, gig workers and the informal economy, people with chronic health issues and rural communities. Including these underserved populations will also help us realise the second ambition of Swiss Re’s Group Sustainability Strategy: building societal resilience.

Bringing more innovative insurance products to our clients

Even before officially launching this initiative, we had already created a number of new products focused on making protection more widely available, accessible and affordable for previously underserved groups and markets. We did this by looking for coverage gaps in existing policies or by identifying gaps in the availability of insurance.

Examples include a first-in-the-market diabetes product to provide support for impaired lives in Ecuador, or a Mexican product that covers the most common ailments among people aged 65 and over, supplementing existing public coverage. In Brazil, we helped develop a product covering tropical diseases that had previously been excluded from the market. In Eastern Europe, our new, flexible cancer insurance policies tailored to the individual needs of patients and their families can improve access to insurance. Finally, we recently launched a new type of disability insurance in Germany aimed specifically at protecting blue-collar workers – and we are now expanding the product to Eastern Europe.

Optimising the insurance value chain through automation

We are also leveraging technology to make insurance more accessible and affordable. By optimising every step of the insurance value chain, innovative digital tools help make processes more cost efficient and enable us to deliver on our promise to pay out claims promptly. One such example is Magnum, Swiss Re’s automated life insurance underwriting engine, which supports life insurers of all sizes to cut application times from weeks to minutes, no matter which stage they have reached on their digital journey. The tool uses cutting-edge cloud technology and powerful base rules from Life Guide, our life and health underwriting guide.

At the other end of the value chain, we are dedicated to making the claims process efficient and worry free for beneficiaries. Our in-house Claims Automated Rules Engine (CARE) simplifies this process from start to finish by providing automated risk assessments, claims triage, guidance for claim managers in their assessments and automated payment of claims.