One of the greatest threats to any brand or category is the loss of relevance. Any number of forces can impede future growth, but it’s possible to clear these hurdles. The one strategy guaranteed to fail? A silent retreat into irrelevance. That is the driving force behind PIMA’s latest research, “Affinity 2030: Exploring Our Blind Spots for a Brighter Future.”
Companies have long used the affinity insurance model to drive steady growth. For the model to evolve, however, we must be vigilant in looking at our own relevance. To provide more insight into the affinity insurance market, we reached out to one of the “Affinity 2030” contributors: Pamela Moy, president at AMA Insurance and group vice president and general manager at the American Medical Association.
About Pamela Moy
As president of AMA Insurance and group vice president and general manager of the American Medical Association, Pamela Moy has extensive experience in the sponsored benefits sector of the affinity market. Since 1998, AMA Insurance has developed insurance, wealth management, and financial service programs tailored to meet the unique needs of physicians, their families, and their practices. Moy and the AMA Insurance team work tirelessly to meet those needs, providing high-quality AMA-sponsored products from top-rated companies with specialized benefits, rates, and features.
As a subsidiary of the AMA, the insurance branch has more than 1 million doctors at its disposal to negotiate highly competitive rates and to customize insurance and financial products from top-rated companies. Moy takes pride in AMA’s extensive vetting process that goes to great lengths to ensure any AMA-sponsored program aligns with its corporate vision and values.
An Assessment of Today’s Affinity Insurance Market
In the affinity market’s sponsored benefits sector, Moy believes that customers want to work with companies they can trust and ones that offer concierge levels of customer service and personalization.
For instance, medical students, residents, and young physicians often face financial pressures as they begin their training and career. As a result, they need low-cost insurance options. Meanwhile, established physicians may need insurance offerings that provide stronger financial support. No matter who your customers are, Moy said, they want to have the option to choose a plan conducive to their unique needs.
To build out these specialized plans, AMA Insurance regularly surveys customers and noncustomers to identify product interest based on age, life/career stage, and other demographics. According to Moy, emerging technology and digital transformations have made the sponsored benefits ecosystem more complex than ever before. Marketing and customer experience are far more multidimensional, which increases the number of people in the ecosystem and puts even greater importance on personalization.
Offering Personalized Products for Your Customers
AMA’s first personalized service — the Disability Income Plan — was developed in the 1960s. It was a time when many physicians were self-employed or in partnerships. By creating its own sponsored program, the AMA provided access to supplemental medical and disability coverage tailored to each physician’s unique needs (with higher benefits than they could get individually).
As large hospital systems begin to absorb self-employed physicians, AMA Insurance is reviewing its existing products to assess whether they meet the needs of those physicians. No matter the findings, Moy said the organization will explore additional offerings so it can continue to offer its customers the most valuable and personalized insurance products available — a practice all insurance companies can adopt to meet their customers’ needs.
Published on April 27, 2020.
PIMA® (Professional Insurance Marketing Association®) is a member-driven trade association focused exclusively on the group-sponsored benefits market.
The research from “Affinity 2030: Exploring Our Blind Spots for a Brighter Future” is available for no cost to PIMA members. For more information on becoming a member, click here.
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