Page 279 - India Insurance Report 2023- BIMTECH

India Insurance Report - Series II 267

1.2. Research Question

Thus, insurers can benefit from sustainability efforts directly while at the same time providing a
significant incentive for societal change towards more ethical and beneficial behaviors. However, they
seem to be embracing these efforts somewhat reluctantly, especially in their core business. This is
potentially due to the lack of clarity about how to proceed in practice in their specific business environment
and what the actual expectations of their customers are. On the other hand, climate change poses a
significant challenge for Singapore, and insurance companies cannot but play a part in developing a
solution. Our research therefore, aims at developing a better understanding of this situation by addressing
the following research question:
What are retail customer expectations for insurers regarding sustainability?

We aim to understand how the answer may vary by customer demographics, goal type, area of
engagement and across insurance companies to provide practical insights for insurers on their next
development efforts in the Singaporean market.

2. Methodology

In order to conduct the analysis, we surveyed retail customers of insurance in Singapore. The structure
and the content of the survey were developed by the authors together with a panel of sustainability
experts from several insurance companies.

Participants were asked to provide demographic information for sampling purposes to ensure equal
representation by gender and across six age cohorts. They were also asked to identify their insurance
carrier in four lines of business (LoB): home – structure, home – contents, third-party liability, and
motor insurance. They were then asked to identify their top five among the 17 UN Sustainability Goals
and to rank the engagement of their insurance company and how relevant this goal was for their next
insurance purchase. The questionnaire then introduced six areas of engagement described in Table 1.
Respondents selected the top three items in each area to make the topic more concrete (Table A9) and
were asked to rank each area of engagement on a Likert scale ranging from 1 (very much / very important)
to 5 (not at all / not important) along four dimensions: (a) importance to them; (b) engagement of own
insurance company; (c) relevance for their next insurance purchase; and (d) how they perceive this area
of engagement to be actually linked to Sustainability.