After completing her first 5km run, Annette Ball was in floods of tears at the achievement.
It was the first milestone on a journey, starting in 2019, that has seen the 56-year-old music teacher from Coventry lose more than three stone in weight and establish a new regime of strenuous exercise nearly every day of the week.
Ball’s story is the kind of inspiring tale of self-improvement that flourishes on social media feeds, but what is more unusual is the company that she credits for getting her moving: her insurer.
A points-based scheme offered by life and health insurer Vitality, which uses a wearable device to track physical activity and offers financial benefits and vouchers for progress, was instrumental to her lifestyle shift.
“The bottom line is that it is insurance, but what it has enabled me to do is get healthier,” Ball says. “It’s certainly changed how I live now.”
It is just one example of a shift that is reshaping the centuries-old insurance sector, fuelled by new technologies and real-time data that insurers are increasingly gathering on their customers.
Vitality calls it “shared-value insurance”, others call it “active insurance”, but the core idea is the same — focusing
