Can a Vulnerability Score help with reducing suicide rates

For many life insurers and reinsurers, the rates of suicide are becoming a significant issue and they are starting to ask how they can reduce this. For 20 -34 years old suicide is becoming the top cause of death and causing millions to be paid out in insurance claims. There is a clear financial benefit to reducing suicides, as well as a moral reason.

The FCA is encouraging firms to look after vulnerable customers, and has published several documents on this, and will be examining it again in early 2019. We look at how understanding vulnerability has the potential to reduce the rate of suicide.

Vulnerability covers all sorts of circumstances. A suicide victim is a vulnerable person who has taken circumstances to an extreme action to overcome their circumstance. Clearly, if we are to help in reducing suicide then we need to undertake some action or input prior to the event.

We are only just at the start of our journey on understanding and managing vulnerability. Equally our understanding of why some people commit suicide is in its infancy. It is presently impossible to identify those consumers who will go on to commit suicide, but there are causes and risk factors that can be identified such as alcoholism, substance abuse, mental illness, previous suicide attempts, bereavement, and the loss of a close friend or relative due to suicide.

At MorganAsh we measure vulnerability. We have created a unique and individual vulnerability score. We call it MARS - MorganAsh Resilience Score, resilience being the positive aspect of vulnerability. The MARS score includes measures of mental health, physical health and lifestyle events such as bereavement, as well as financial measures including debt.   There is likely to be a good correlation between those consumers who are vulnerable and go onto attempt suicide.

The main driver for introducing a MARS score is to be able to measure and manage vulnerability within financial services, and hence avoid regulatory fines for not meeting regulatory requirements. This is too expansive a topic to define here, but put simply, the vision is that the MARS score will be used just like a credit score for the quick and easy assessment of vulnerability, just like we use the credit score for quick and easy assessment of debt.

While this will take some time to develop, looking ahead, if this MARS score was available, then there exists a means to highlight vulnerable consumers and those especially susceptible to suicide.  It is likely that with more measurement and data, we will be able to understand patterns and hence target consumers better.

Having identified those at high risk, there then becomes the issue of what can be done. There are of course many possibilities for intervention. One of these is our Crisis Support service that looks after consumers in a crisis who need support. The service covers any illness, including mental health issues, and we link in with our partners like Port of Call to help those consumers with addictions.

Our Crisis Support service grew out of claims work and as well as being empathetic, includes psychosocial assessment to understand the route course of conditions. Can we use these skills to understand the issues for potential suicide victims? 

At a time when the NHS is trying to move to prevention instead of just cure, should not the insurance industry try to take the same approach? In group insurance, we have shown that early intervention prevents future claims for income protection, with the majority of successful early intervention being for multi-skeletal or mental health issues. Earlier this year, we created a proactive mental health service, where we use smart phone surveys with employees to ascertain their mental health and to nudge reluctant mental health sufferers to start talking. Could we apply these same techniques to our policy holders who have a low MARS score (i.e. who are potentially vulnerable)? If we could collect this data, then using AI we can analyse it to understand patterns, and potentially improve how we target policy holders.

Providing added value services and being proactive with our customers is already possible. What we don’t have yet is the cost/benefit to demonstrate the financial and morale benefit of providing such services, and until these costs/benefits are understood, we are unlikely to see such service provided. Starting to measure vulnerability and understand its correlation with consumer detriment is a great first step, and could lead onto correlation with suicide.

The MARS has been nominated and shortlisted for the “Innovation in Ageing” competition and also forms the basis for the presentation to be given at the Westminster & City Retirement summit on 6th December.

If you would like to understand more about MARS as a means to help measure and manage vulnerability,  I have a more in depth paper i am happy to share.