Chief Executive Officer’s Review

“We believe that our strategic choices helped us navigate the anticipated turbulences of 2021, which impacted the entire sector, with solid results in absolute and in comparison to the sector. Furthermore, those choices will position us well for 2022.”

 

As we wrapped up the year 2020, with the strongest performance ever, we had anticipated serious challenges ahead of us. 1) We knew the lower claims of 2020, due to lockdown and decreased footfalls to medical providers, would surge higher in 2021 as delayed procedures would materialize and footfalls would intensify. 2) The implementation of Article-11 – announced at the end of 2020 – would bring in additional claims costs that were not in the base of 2020, where almost 200 government medical providers opened doors for insured people at unified imposed prices set by the regulators. 3) The migration to NPHIES system would not only add additional cost on both payers and providers; but put pressure on the development and integration capacities of our operation, and 4) A shrinking market, insured-wise, due to enforcement gap; would present growth challenges for us and the sector in large.

 

 

Our response to these challenges, to stay the course on our 1Bupa growth strategy, were clear and sound: 1) be disciplined in our pricing strategy and to not be misguided by the low loss ratio of 2020, 2) continue investing in our value proposition to be the best in servicing our customers and members, 3) double down on digital transformation in terms of a) service/operation, b) digital sales and c) the creation of Bupa Arabia Ventures as a corporate venture capital arm to play a leading role within the insurtech and healthtech space, and 4) invest in our people, whom we believe are the reason we are what we are, with focused and tailor-made development programs for different levels and functions.

 

 

Our Key Performance Indicators Snapshot

Very strong performance considering the challenges faced:

Gross written premiums:

 

Seeding for the Future

Digital all the way…

 

Bupa Arabia will continue consolidating its leadership position in terms of digital transformation and building its digital ecosystem in order to enhance the digital offering to its members. We wrapped up 2021 with a transformed value proposition that put digital technologies at the centre of the most critical parts of the business and the customer journey. Indeed, last year saw the following components enhanced or changed dramatically to offer an excellent and customized experience to our members:

• Digital Health: All of our Tebtom services are now offered through our App.
• Efficiency: We deployed Robotic Process Automations (RPAs) in many critical processes to boost productivity.
• Automation: We increased the automation of the e-commerce platform to a major extent, which led to a breakthrough reduction in customer turnaround.
• AI: We kicked off the AI models to predict health outcomes and manage medical cost better.
• Digital Finance: We have initiated many initiatives to digitalize our finance processes and implement many ad hoc regulatory changes.
• People: We are designing and working on implementing the Human Capital Management platform which will allow a better employee experience.

During 2022, Bupa Arabia will be working on introducing game-changing initiatives such as electronic health record, AI symptom checker, medical chat bot as well as population health management. The aim of the latter is to achieve a breakthrough in reducing the inflation curve while enhancing the health outcomes of its members.

 

 

We understand that it is our people who deliver Bupa Arabia’s exceptional customer experience, and we strive to create a culture that would attract and retain the most talented and highly engaged employees. For years, Bupa Arabia has been thriving towards becoming the most admired healthcare company that attracts, grows, engages, and retains the best talent in the industry. The year 2021 was no different as we have successfully planned and implemented more than 32 HR initiatives, 16 policies, and 12 practices for our people during challenging circumstances. More people applied and more joined us in 2021 and less people left with a lowest turnover rate of 9%. We offered our top talents who performed exceptionally well, more than 140 promotions and rotated more than 199 employees in cross functional opportunities thus maintaining a very healthy succession pipeline of 83%. We partnered with top learning schools (IMD, Hult, Harvard, Cornell etc.) to provide more than 80 learning programs, covering more than 1,400 employees with an average of 20+ learning hours per individual. More people joined, less people left, and in between we were successful in highly motivating and engaging our people through multiple cultural initiatives that were tracked through Glint, our external partner, and achieved a record engagement score of 83. All of these efforts have enabled us to achieve our financial targets, provide better customer experience and maintain our leadership position in the market.

Looking ahead into 2022

We are cautiously optimistic about 2022 as we expect multiple events to have noticeable impact on the market:

• Macroeconomic factors: Pace and robustness of post-pandemic recovery, as restrictions are lifted and the impact of oil prices surge coupled with ongoing logistical challenges from prior year. These factors will have an impact on employment market which is the fuel for health insurance.
• Regulatory factors: 1) Current insured population is approximately 30% less than potential market when enforcement of the mandate was fully implemented by the regulator. We have seen initiatives kicked off on this front and we will need to see their outcomes to judge their effectiveness, 2) enforcement of domestic helpers health insurance will bring in a new segment to the market, 3) launch of an improved health insurance policy under the name of Essential Benefits Package by CHI, to be implemented as of July 2022, will provide better and higher benefits to insured members but will result in higher cost that the sector must price for to neutralize the utilization risk, 4) full impact of NPHIES roll-out which comes at a price tag of 2% of claims.
• Behavioral factors: 1) An emerging behavior from medical providers to cross-sell and up-sell their services, leading to higher utilization and geographical expansion of some, and 2) A noticeable pick-up in members utilization, frequency of visits to medical providers.

I believe that Bupa Arabia is well-equipped to deal with these challenges to bring about the desired outcomes. My confidence stems from the well-rooted performance culture we have built over years, from the technical readiness of our servicing and operational teams and our great customer-facing ambassadors who create, grow and maintain the best relationships with our key stakeholders.

 

Tal Hisham Nazer
Chief Executive Officer and Executive Board Member