According to the Institute for Customer Service’s latest breakthrough research, 37% of customers say they’ve stopped using an organisation because of its reputation or business practices. Within this, leading factors relate to the quality of its customer service, treatment of employees, communication with customers, and commitment to environmental sustainability.
The statistics show that ESG is important to brokers’ customers, but how can you, our brokers, understand our approach to this important topic?
In support of our commitment to ensuring ESG is embedded across our business, and to help brokers understand our stance, we produced our second sustainability report this year. As well as offering transparency about our approach to ESG-related topics, this report helps us track the delivery of our ESG strategy.
Our ESG framework has been designed to focus on five areas where we believe we can have the most significant impact. Alongside sustainable operations, the other four focus areas are valuing our customers, responsible business, people and culture, and supporting our communities.
Launched in 2022, the Ageas Group Impact24 strategy is a long-term vision that has sustainability at its heart. Our UK ESG strategy is aligned with Impact24’s sustainability goals, and we’ve pledged that ESG considerations will be integrated into 100% of our investment decisions by 2024.
While we continue to work on ensuring sustainability is truly embedded in our culture and decision making, the progress we’re making against our sustainability goals is tangible. We’ve been certified as a CarbonNeutral® company by Climate Impact Partners for the second consecutive year.
As part of Ageas Group, we’ve joined the UN convened Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance (NZAOA), a group of the world’s largest pension funds and insurers committed to decarbonising their portfolios by 2050.
Carbon emissions across our business have reduced by 46% since 2021 and, as a result of our continued efforts to reduce our energy use across our offices, we’re using 47% less electricity, 37% less gas, and water consumption is down 39% compared to 2019.
Our award-winning Green Car Parts programme is helping to reduce the environmental impact of car accidents. Green car parts are original manufacturer car parts taken from one vehicle and used to fix another. This reduces the use of raw materials, extends the life of existing parts, and minimises the likelihood of damaged cars being scrapped due to the high cost of new parts. In 2022, 31% of car repairs involved the use of at least one green car part.
We’re piloting video ‘visits’ when dealing with escape of water claims. This is helping to reduce the number of physical visits we make to assess claims, reduce fuel consumption, and speed up the process for our customers. Other innovations include visual support technology such as Photo Assist and SightCall, enabling us to inspect damage to people’s homes and cars without the need to send people out to make assessments.
Since 2016, we’ve supported Flood Re’s efforts to help people in high flood risk areas access insurance. A joint initiative between the industry and government, in 2022 we were one of the first insurers in the UK to sign up to its Build Back Better scheme. The focus of this scheme isn’t just on fixing damaged properties, it aims to make sure houses in high flood risk areas are built back in a more flood-resilient way.
As we continue to embrace green mobility and the need to lower carbon emissions, we’re also providing an increasing number of insurance policies for electric vehicles. As the world moves towards a low-carbon automotive future, electric cars are becoming an integral way to pursue this goal.
As our Ageas Care programme continues to develop, we conducted a cost of living review. This has given us insight into our customers’ circumstances and how the current economic landscape is impacting them.
This has enabled us to build on our Vulnerable Customer programme, including upskilling with tailored training to support customers in vulnerable situations, changing processes for those behind on payments, and reviewing how we manage excess payments.
Alongside making sure our phone number is easy to find, customers have access to a virtual assistant. With the ability to report many types of claims online including storm, we’ve significantly improved our digital journeys.
As the number of customers choosing to engage with us digitally continues to increase, we’ve been able to significantly reduce paper-based marketing and direct customer mail too.
We’re committed to growing profitably through ethical and responsible investments that support a sustainable future. We believe that we can promote change by choosing how and where we invest our funds.
The MSCI ESG rating of our bond portfolio is AAA with a weighted average of AA, which defines us as an industry leader in sustainable investments. During 2022, our sustainable investments increased by 57%, from £156m to £245m.
We recognise the importance of understanding and managing climate impacts and continue to integrate climate-risk considerations into our decision-making. Additionally, sustainability is increasingly guiding decisions about our choice of suppliers, and we also set objectives on sustainability in our claims supply chain.
We’ve conducted a deep dive into the experiences of ethnic minority applicants and employees, resulting in a focus on recruitment as an area to improve. In 2022 we became members of iCAN, the insurance industry’s cultural awareness network, which is supporting us in attracting more diverse applicants.
We’re also working hard to reduce our gender pay gap and set a target to increase female representation in senior management roles to more than 40% by the end of 2023, which we’ve already achieved. As part of this work, we’re introducing inclusion training for anyone involved in hiring employees, providing maternity support for new parents, and collaborating on a university-led study looking at the causes of the gender pay gap and potential interventions.
Working with charities and supporting our local communities is important to our employees, and we continue to look for new opportunities to support society and people in need.
In 2022, our employees voted to support Air Ambulances UK as our primary charity partner. Altogether, employees have raised more than £24,000 through sponsored activities, with Ageas teams completing the Great South Run and the Welsh Three Peaks challenge, as well as fundraising events such as Brew for the Crew.
We believe we have a responsibility to help shape the sustainable future we all want, and this is just a snapshot of our dedication to everything ESG. You can read more about the progress we’ve made in our 2022 sustainability report, and hear from the people and customers who sit at the heart of our business.
We’re committed to supporting our customers, our people and our partners, ensuring everything we do contributes to a more sustainable society.
We hope you’ll enjoy reading the report and if you have any questions about our approach to ESG, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
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