HCM CITY – The life insurance company AIA Vietnam has recently launched an industry-first life insurance product integrated with a science-backed health and wellness programme – Uplift your life 10+ with Vitality – that encourages healthier lifestyle activities with incentives and rewards. The company is a member of the Hong Kong-based AIA Group, the leading life, health and wellness provider in Asia-Pacific.

Việt Nam News spoke to Stuart Spencer - Chief Marketing Officer of AIA Group - on AIA Vitality, the health and wellness programme integrated with the life insurance product, as well as how AIA Group strives towards achieving its purpose of enabling people to live Healthier, Longer and Better Lives.

Stuart A. Spencer, Chief Marketing Officer of AIA Group, the leading life, health and wellness provider in Asia-Pacific. – Photo courtesy of AIA Group

Can you go into more detail about AIA Group’s purpose? How does that affect how AIA Group operates?

AIA Group is a purpose-driven organisation, and we want to fundamentally transform health, wellness and healthcare across Asia Pacific; we want our 40 million customers across 18 Asia Pacific markets today and customers of tomorrow to live Healthier, Longer and Better Lives.

We want to set ourselves apart from our competitors by actively engaging in the lives of our customers, working side-by-side with them to achieve our purpose, instead of the typical "you die, we pay" model of life insurance.

We are on a mission to build a movement on health and wellness, and we have been working on this since even before the pandemic.

AIA Vitality offers the integration between life and health insurance and a wellness programme. How does it work and contribute towards the company’s purpose?

First of all, it has to be said that the pandemic has exposed the weaknesses of healthcare systems across the world and how overburdened they can get. People are realising that illness can happen at any time, to anyone, which can be a burden on their health and finance.

There are communicable diseases, but there are also lifestyle diseases, such as diabetes, lung and heart diseases, and hypertension, which are caused by things like drinking, smoking, pollution, not enough exercise, and bad diet.

At AIA, we believe we have a responsibility to change the behaviour of people. But to do that, people need incentives, rewards and motivations. We need to engage people.

AIA Vitality gives a structured, comprehensive programme and lifestyle rewards for customers who buy the “Uplift your life 10+ with Vitality” product, encouraging them to do healthy activities and putting them in control of improving their long-term health, all through a mobile app. For example, Vitality motivates me to make healthier choices about my life, such as increase my daily steps to get rewards. If I am just a few points short to get some rewards, like a free Starbuck coffee, I would do what it takes to get them. As a result, I care more about my physical and mental health.

We have 1.5 million active AIA Vitality members who perform 800,000 workouts each day. Life insurance and long-term savings with protection are combined with wellness to create a product that will help Việt Nam become a healthier nation.

AIA Vietnam recently launched Uplift your life 10+ with Vitality, an industry-first life insurance product integrated with a health and wellness programme. – Photo courtesy of AIA Group

How effective is AIA Vitality?

The programme is the most structured, effective and proven health and wellness programme that you have in the palm of your hand, and it really does deliver better commercial and clinical outcomes.

We carry out studies across the markets that the programme has been launched in, and we have real world evidence. For example, 52 per cent of at-risk customers saw their blood pressure levels improve, 72 per cent saw their blood glucose levels decline, and 35 per cent have moved to a “healthy” cholesterol level. Vitality customers are reducing their body mass index as well.

A very important aspect of Vitality is shared value. It is not only good for customers, AIA and shareholders, but also the community and society as well. Disease is an annual multi-billion dollar burden on the Vietnamese Government, and because a lot of this just comes down to lifestyle diseases, like diabetes, you can change your behaviours to be healthy.

We make products that we can sell, we do not sell products that we can make, and Vitality is the result of AIA Group being a customer-led business that designs products to meet customers’ needs. It took us years to make this sophisticated product that is simultaneously simple and intuitive for customers to use.

AIA Vitality demonstrates AIA Group’s commitment in achieving its purpose of helping people live Healthier, Longer and Better Lives, said Spencer. – Photo courtesy of AIA Group

Aside from AIA Vitality, what other programmes or initiatives is the company doing to help people live Healthier, Longer and Better Lives?

At AIA, our focus is to make a difference and improve the quality of life for the people in communities we operate in. That is where our AIA One Billion campaign comes in: to engage a billion people across Asia to lead a Healthier, Longer and Better Life by 2030.

This is a series of motivational activities, events, social media campaigns, online resources and other touch-points to improve people’s physical, mental, financial and environmental wellness. They aim to trigger an action or response (a like, a share, a comment, a view, etc.) to inspire people to start their own journey to health and wellness.

Asia Healthiest Schools is an important initiative within the campaign. It provides teachers with educational resources so they can learn healthy habits and improve their schools. We also launched a competition with prizes for schools to design initiatives that enable their students to become healthier.

Lots of schools in Việt Nam are participating. We started this competition in Australia, Thailand, Hong Kong and Việt Nam, and we are expanding it into other markets.

This is another example of what we are doing to engage with our communities. It is about doing the right thing, touching the lives of young people so they can develop healthy physical and mental habits while they are still young.

AIA Group has been partnering with Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, a top-ranked team in the English Premier League with millions of fans in Asia. How effective is this partnership in engaging with customers?

We have been the global principal partner of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club for over 10 years, and this partnership is further proof of our commitment to Asia on delivering our purpose. Sport is attractive to young people, and we want to attract more young, healthy customers. We want to be known as an active brand, connected to ideas like winning, activity, wellness, and Vitality.

Football is the number one spectator and participation sport in Asia, and the Premier League is now more widely broadcast across Asia than ever before. More people are seeing the games and our branding on the jerseys, seeing AIA associated with an active, winning team.

This partnership is an extremely effective way for us to engage with our customers and build brand recognition. AIA is the most recognised shirt sponsor in the Premier League.

Việt Nam is crazy for football, so being connected to a great football asset is really important for us.

We also have Tottenham Hotspur certified coaches living in Asia who run training camps for young children. Our football workshops have benefited over 80,000 kids in the region.

What are some of AIA’s future plans for the Việt Nam market?

We plan to integrate AIA Vitality in more products here, and we will build new health products so that we can have a sophisticated array of health insurance products to protect the people in Việt Nam, such as comprehensive hospitalisation or critical illness products that protect the whole family, or products that help customers get medical care outside of Việt Nam.

With regards to football, we are also planning a lot more engagement activities and camps, getting more kids to do more training. In Việt Nam, the Kids Football Clinic has been held for the past three years and it is expected to come back this April for the fourth season.

In closing, we do not want to just pay claims; we want to be a partner, helping customers prevent disease, and if there are people who are ill, we want them to have best treatment, and be with them on their health and wellness journey whenever they need us.