Southern Cross Health Society has seen three years of consecutive growth in a shrinking market, and, according to its CEO, the company is now looking to shift its focus from health insurance to health ‘assurance’, and to improve New Zealand’s private health system in the process.
Southern Cross Health Society CEO Nick Astwick (pictured) says some of the highlights of the past 12 months have been its high claims to premium ratio, its digital transformation and the development of various wellbeing propositions, the BeingWell scheme being primary among them. He says the company is now looking to ‘reshape’ the private health system over time, and to give New Zealanders the confidence to make better decisions with regards to their health.
“We’re on a change journey at the moment, much like many businesses, and our vision is a healthier society,” Astwick told Insurance Business.
“We’ve been very good at ‘paying the bills’ and helping people through their sickness journeys for many years, but we’re going from being a health insurer to a health ‘assurer’, which is all about empowering our customers to live their healthiest lives. That means making good choices, accessing the health system, and ultimately reshaping that system over time to deliver a better quality of life.”
Astwick noted that only three out of 10 New Zealanders currently have health insurance, but Southern Cross makes up 62% of those three. It also accounts for approximately 70% of the claims in the marketplace, and its claim payout rate has remained consistently high.
“We’ve grown for the third year in a row, which is a great achievement given the market has been shrinking over the last 10 years,” Astwick said. “We’ve held our payout ratio at $0.89 to every dollar received in premiums, and we’ve gone from 59% of our customers’ processes being done digitally to 77%, which is a major lift.”
“The bill does keep going up each year, so a challenge for us has been how we balance funding with more benefits for our members,” he added.
Looking ahead to the coming year, Astwick says the business is hoping to achieve several key things.
“We’re really helping our members navigating their health journeys and the health system with more confidence, and we want to fund new benefits and reduce medical inflation,” he said.
“We also want to think about how we work with our providers – specialists, hospitals, etc. to shape the system over the long term and deliver better outcomes for customers.”
