Name: Live Long and Prosper: How Insurers are Using Data, Technology, and Behavioral Science to Extend 'Healthspans' - and Deepen Relationships with Customers
Uploaded: 2025-11-17
Duration: 20 min 52 s

One of Asia’s leading insurers has made a bold bet: that the future of its business lies not just in covering illness, but in helping its policy holders live “healthier, longer, better lives.” To that end, it is weaving data, AI, and behavioral science into everyday life — turning fitness tracking, preventive care, and personalized health nudges into core services. Is the strategy working? Can an insurer truly influence customers’ daily behavior? And is this innovative model as good for business as it is for well-being?

Live Long and Prosper: How Insurers are Using Data, Technology, and Behavioral Science to Extend "Healthspans" - and Deepen Relationships with Customers

Conferences

Welcome back everyone. Please come in and take your seats. Uh, we'll start our afternoon session. Our next session explores a quiet revolution in insurance where data, AI, and behavioral science are not only assessing risk but can actively shape daily habits. From movement and sleep to preventive care, this new model is being deployed by one of Asia's leading insurers, and it raises important questions. Can an insurer influence behavior at scale? And do healthy customers really lead healthier lead to healthier returns? To give us some answers, I'm pleased to welcome Stuart A. Spencer, Group chief marketing officer of AIA Group. Stuart, please. Let's put you in. Thank you, Stuart, for being with us. Pleasure. It's a real treat to have Stuart. Um, AIA is one of the most extraordinary and innovative insurance companies that I've ever, uh, studied, and, uh, Stewart has been right at the center of of this grand project that they have undertaken, um. How many people here are familiar with the with the AIA theme? I see it all the time on the sides of buses in Hong Kong, but maybe Stuart, you could start off by telling us what it is. So Clay, first of all, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure and an honor to be here at AIA. Our purpose is healthier, longer, and better lives. It's not per se a theme, it's not a bumper sticker, it is not a slogan, it is not a tagline. It fundamentally serves as our north star as an organization. It guides the decisions we make. It guides how we operate, how we think, what we do, how we allocate capital, and fundamentally underpins the strategic priorities that we define as an enterprise. The reason that our purpose is healthy, longer better lives is that we are the largest pan-Asian life and health insurer. Operating in 18 markets across this part of the world with 40 million customers and you can appreciate. We want our customers, given the business that we're in life and health, to live healthier, longer and better lives, and what we heard this morning is that this part of the world is experiencing unprecedented levels of socioeconomic and even political transformation, an incredible backdrop of rising incomes and lifting hundreds and hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, raising living standards, and so on. But behind that in a way, success, that veneer masks the fact that we have a massive proliferation of noncommunicable lifestyle diseases, and if I can, let me in a way to socialize and contextualize all of this for all of you. Um, lifestyle diseases that are non-communicable, that are essentially brought upon by our own behavior or potentially poor behavior, bring on ailments, hazards such as diabetes, heart attack, stroke, cancer, hypertension, chronic lung disease, and these are triggered by choices that we make choices about how we or we do not exercise or lack of exercise, poor diet. Excessive alcohol, smoking, um, stress, pollution, all of this serves to create a a fairly dangerous cocktail. And what we see is that today across Asia, even here in Malaysia, close to 70%. Of all disease diagnoses represent lifestyle disease. 70%, 70% in other nations it's even higher, 80%. Australia close to 90%. So in a way we say that Asia is getting wealthier but not healthier. We call it affluenza. And you can appreciate, therefore, that for us it's a crisis in many levels it's a public health catastrophe. We see super high levels of childhood obesity, and this is not a criticism and just an observation, the 10:30 break that we had here. I looked at the offerings and it was Deep fried and wok fried and the glucose content of those shake those cakes and pandan, I said to myself, this is the quintessential reason why we have the situation that we have that that has the capacity, the propensity clay to undermine, sabotage, derail, and torpedo all this incredible infrastructure. Transformation and the pace of economic development that we spent this morning discussing behind all of that, you have the human piece and you can't work well if you're unwell and Hence our focus to cultivate, enable, realize healthy and longer, better lives has both a community as well as commercial dimension that is unassailable. Tell me a little bit about how AIA came to this, you know, the journey of how it came to this this focus, because, um, you know, I look at other insurers, particularly in Asia, you don't typically think of insurers. As as being concerned about lifestyle lifestyle coaches they're looking at lifestyle statistics and odds and you know, calculating their premiums accordingly, but it's really unusual that you are hands on getting involved trying to shape people's behaviors. Well, we went IPO in 2010 when we disengaged from AIG, our former parent, and at that time we billed ourselves as the real life company. Which some of you may remember. And when I rejoined the company in 2017, I examined that because I felt that we were saying something about ourselves. We weren't really discussing our customers. And we found that there was a play on words. People misunderstood what we were talking about. We were trying to infer that life has its share of ups and downs, but AIA understands that the good and bad we'll always be there with you for you with a real life company. We understand real life. But unfortunately or fortunately, many people misunderstood it as are saying that we were the only real life insurance company. All the others were fake. So I realized that we were just not only were we not expressing what we actually do, we weren't articulating a commitment to our customers in any way. And we were being misunderstood and the clincher was our CEO at the time when I told our CEO at the time that 40% of the people that we researched misattributed that to Great Eastern, one of our competitors. He was like, OK, enough's enough. So we undertook a fairly detailed and lengthy process of introspection of self-examination, of trying to understand. How we were perceived truly peel the onion to determine what business we are really in, and ultimately what is the good we want to do for society, what is the difference that we want to make? What is the legacy we want to leave behind as an enterprise? Um, we were in business for over 100 years and we said, OK, what do we, what do we actually, what do people think we do? And it was clear with our launch of AIA Vitality and a recognition that we need to drive behavioral change that our purpose truly was about enabling healthier, longer, and better lives and in my capacity I have to prove it. I have to make it tangible. I have to make it unassailable and abundantly clear, and that's what we spend our time. Conveying, doing, creating in the marketplace. A real challenge to try to communicate that message, that purpose across 18 radically different markets. It's less challenging than you think because what underpins all of this is really as you opened up the shift that we've made from being a traditional you die we pay life insurer, purely transactional, not relational. To an insurer that understands we need to cultivate, deepen and strengthen lifetime relationships, lifelong relationships, not transactional relationships, because we're in the people business. We sell long term products and it is absolutely imperative. Let me repeat, absolutely imperative that if you are in this business. With the backdrop of lifestyle disease, this inexorable proliferation of lifestyle disease, what are you going to do? Are you going to sit on the sidelines and hope for the best, hope that your actuaries price the products properly and that your actuarial curves, your mortality, morbidity will ultimately turn out the way you want, or do you take a stand, or do you become actively engaged and positively affirmatively intrusive? In the lives of your customers and shape behavior. If you are in our industry today, And you are not actively trying to get your customers to live healthier, longer, and better lives and be more a behavioral change catalyst than you are purely an underwriter, then you are absolutely missing a trick, that's fascinating. a little bit about how you engage and the sort of things that you do to influence behavior. So, we do a lot of marketing and we have a brand ecosystem that tries to make us fundamentally synonymous with healthy longer, better lives. You want people to think that AIA are the healthy and longer, Better lives people, but our principal platform is AIA Vitality. AIA Vitality is a science-backed, wellness-based application. That is very simple in its design and very clear in its purpose. Know your health, improve your health, get rewarded. We know and we understand behavioral economics. We know people need rewards. They need incentives because there's this incredible knowing, doing gap. We all have it. I knew I needed to stop drinking, but I didn't do anything about it until my headaches were unbearable. So people know that about their health. People want our research is clear. People want to be healthier. They want a tool. They want a helping hand. They want, they want guidance. They want advice. They want affirmation, and they don't want to feel intimidated about embarking on a health care journey. So how does how does vitality work? I mean, just walk through it. I can pull it out, but I'm not. It is very rewarding and it is very structured, so you determine the type of um activity, physical activity you want to do and you track. I've got, I've got my wearable. I've I've got two watches. People ask me all the time, why do I have two watches, I have two wrists, but this is, this is for uh. And this is for recognition of hard work, right? And so the program is very simple. It is purely digital and we continue to invest to make user journeys easier, more intuitive, more personalized, more customized. So Clay has clay's vitality. I have my vitality, and the thinking behind it really is that. We want to try and better democratize our underwriting, our pricing, and our risk because the clay of today is not the clay of 30 years ago. You may have taken out a life insurance policy when you started a family 30 years ago, but You change as a risk. You evolve as a human being, and your risk profile parameters change as well. So it's by no means static, and what vitality does, it rewards people for taking better care of themselves. So your premiums are adjusted based on your year over year engagement in the program. So if you hit your vitality points target, we will reward you by reducing your premiums. If you take better care of yourself, why should you pay and subsidize the people in the risk pool who don't take care of themselves? So we're rewarding you and we're acknowledging your great behavior and it's Going right into your pocketbook, you're paying us less and in so doing we create this virtuous circle of what we call shared value better for clay, it's better for AIA, and it's better for society. When we look at the Asia Pacific cost of the disease burden, it is, it is beyond the $1 trillion right? So the impact on productivity is. Extreme not only financially but also for society as well. And you take the, you take that and then you take the massive protection gap that we have across Asia. The insurance that people have versus the insurance people need is also estimated about $0.5 trillion and this is in the backdrop of 2030. 60% of the global middle class will be here in Asia, and we've learned post pandemic. That people recognize the need for private health care more than ever. People suffered through the democratization of the devastation of the pandemic and recognized that sickness, illness is inevitable, and for younger people death may be distant. But sickness is inevitable, and so we see a surge in demand for private health care, and we are the largest pan-Asian provider of medical insurance today. And how can you measure this in outcomes? Is it working? How can you tell? Yeah, so we're maniacal about measurement, as you can appreciate, and we've undertaken longitudinal research since the inception of AIA Vitality across all the markets in which we operate. And we want to track what is the impact that this program is truly having on mortality and morbidity and ultimately longevity because that is the business that we're in. So we track key, I would say biometric KPIs. We track BMI, we track HbA1C, we track LDL, we track blood pressure, of course we measure heart rate. We have millions and millions of workouts every day, and what we've learned is. There's absolutely a pixie dust vitality effect that takes place. Our vitality customers claim less. They recommend us more on MPS. They buy more from us in terms of upsell, cross-sell, and we've seen great outcomes in both mortality and morbidity extension. So we have clinical improvements and we have commercial improvements. And on the clinical side we've seen real reductions in HbA1c. I'm an example. I'm a living proof. My HbA1c was dangerously high. I'm Vitality Platinum now. My HbA1C has come way down. So we've seen, we've got. measure health from unhealthy to healthy across BMI, HbA1C, LDL, etc. and we see sustained improvement based on the degree of engagement in the program. So you're measuring this partly through wearables, but also presumably through actual visits to healthcare providers work. So in the Know your health, improve your health, get rewarded, it's critical that people do what we call a vitality health check because the idea is to shift the paradigm. Completely away from diagnosis, treatment, and rehab to prediction, prevention, early detection, early intervention, guys, we don't want our customers to get cancer. We want our customers to discover that they may have a propensity for cancer early on. So we're trying to shift that focus completely to prevention, and vitality is the quintessential, as I said, science-backed platform that's ultimately designed to drive prediction and prevention. So how much do recent advances in both kind of wearable kind of hardware gadget technology and AI, you know, large language incredible. I mean, the amount of information we now possess about our customers and how that can feed into how we communicate, what we offer, how we guide their journeys, and you know we've been talking all morning about AI. Um, you know, we have enterprise-wide work that's underway to optimize the impact of AI, not that we become AIA per se, but that we are intelligent in our in our usage and given our healthcare business, given Vitality Vitality have just come out with Vitality AI, which I saw a demo the other day which is really fantastic, which is super intuitive. And it will help engage even more customers in a much more personalized way, and that's what people want today. Show me, you know me. You want, you want to believe that I understand you, that I know you, I understand your needs, I can anticipate your needs, and that I value you as a customer. All of this is being fed in to hyper personalize what we know about you so that our communications with you and our engagement with you makes you feel like you're understood and you're valued. And that's crucial. How much does it help to kind of bring customers together in this effort? I, you know, think of, uh, in Hong Kong, uh, you know, the, the Hong Kong I, the big Ferris wheel, has the AIA brand of it and it has this amazing vitality center underneath it. Tell us about that and how that works and and why you. So look, I mean, we are determined to give back to the community if if our purpose is to enable healthier, longer, better lives, then we're we want everybody, people who aren't our customers who will never be our customers, we have an effort called AIA 1 billion. We, we are committing to engage a billion people, uh, to live a healthier, longer life and, and take a positive action that improves their health by 2030 and we are at 500 and something million now mid mid-decade. So our effort is to is to drive social change. Our effort is to have social impact, guys, we are throwing everything in the kitchen sink to get people to recognize how important it is to be healthier and to do our part as the leader of our of the life insurance industry. To be heavyweight on influence and to trigger and catalyze those those moments that people rethink healthy, believe that they can be healthier, and then take active steps to become healthier, and that is an incredible thing to be able to catalyze. It's a remarkable thing, you know, we were talking earlier this morning with Dr. Kass about this idea of technology converging, but what I hear from you is that there's this conversion. Conversion of uh technology, data, uh uh you know uh hardware, but also understanding of human behavior, uh, and, and, uh, kind of a unique cultural awareness. I mean I cannot think of any other insurer that serves 18, you know, markets as radically different. Music. Look, it's about clarity. It's about courage, and ultimately it's about humanity. No chatbot, no robot, no website, um, no, you know, anime, um, Avatar is going to replace a caring, feeling, smart AIA agent who provides incredible advice sitting across the kitchen table looking. You in the eye and making sure that we are giving you a blanket of love, care and protection. It's never going to change, but what we will have are tools that enable that conversation to be even more enriching, even more personalized, even more productive. It's extraordinary. I mean, you must have an incredible cross-functional team to be able to deliver all those things. I'm blessed. Well, that's all the time we have. This has been a fascinating conversation, a unique, uh, company, uh, embarked on a unique, uh, uh, mission, uh, with a, with a very laudatory goal. Stuart, thank you so much for sharing your insights. Thank you for having me. Thank you. OK, take care, buddy. Bye bye.