VitalityLife Claims & Shared Value Report 2025
“Peace of mind alone will not close the protection gap”
Justin Taurog CEO, Vitality Life
Everything changes in life. An adage tracing back to ancient Greek philosophy that can – and must – also apply to the UK protection insurance market. Traditionally, protection has focused on offering people peace of mind. In exchange for a monthly premium today, clients can be safe in the knowledge that if something happens tomorrow, they’ll be covered.
We are immensely proud that VitalityLife paid a total of £142m claims in 2024 – 92% across all protection products. Our broadened suite now offers more comprehensive and flexible cover through Income Protection, Serious Illness Cover, Dementia FrailCare Cover, Whole of Life, and - more recently - Accident and Fracture Cover.
But why should our role only be to support people around serious illness, injury or death? This, we explore in our VitalityLife Claims & Shared Value Report 2025.
There's more to life than just protection
Protecting people from falling into financial hardship when things go wrong is always vital, but it’s clear from the protection gap in the UK that many clients remain unconvinced by insurance for something they often think is never going to happen to them.
Rapid advances in technology, the advance of A.I and changing consumer trends also tell us that if we don’t move forward as a market, we run the risk of getting left behind. Especially as psychological biases hold back customers - looking for upfront reward and immediate gratification - from protecting themselves from an event that they hope will never happen.
Almost £100m worth of value was delivered to Vitality members during 2024 through the Vitality Programme – another figure we are delighted to share. Why? Because this was received by them long before they needed to make a claim.
Shared value, not just added value
At scale, the Vitality Shared Value Insurance model now covers 1.8 million lives in total. Over the course of last year, these rewards and incentives add up to more than a million cinema tickets received, almost three million hand-crafted beverages consumed from Caffè Nero and cashback from around 1.5 million healthy food shops at Waitrose & Partners, plus much more. All integrated into lifestyles and enjoyed by our members each and every day.
Furthermore, this encouraged Vitality members to take steps to get healthier too: through health reviews, gym visits, tracked physical activity, such as walks, runs and workouts. They saved £40m in lower premiums through Optimiser, whilst being more active and less likely to cancel their plan on average. We also see those who engage in the Vitality Programme live up to five years longer1, our data has revealed, based on a robust calculation from a seven-year study based on the lives of 465,000 Vitality members peered-reviewed by the London School of Economics.
Total paid in claims to VitalityLife members across all protection products
in rewards and savings from the Vitality Programme
Moving insurance forward
With both Consumer Duty and the FCA Pure Protection Study putting real value in the spotlight and calling upon insurers and advisers to better meet the needs of clients – not just tomorrow, but today – this report helps prove what we’ve been arguing since entering the market in 2007: that traditional life insurance requires a rethink and needs to move forward.
At a time when choice in the market is consolidating and stifling innovation elsewhere, our pioneering philosophy is no longer a new idea in the protection market. The Vitality Claims & Shared Value Report 2025 provides yet more evidence that our Shared Value Insurance model is working - not just to protect more people by offering market-leading products and higher levels of upfront, tangible value, but to prevent people from needing to claim at all. This, we believe, is transforming life insurance allowing, you, as financial advisers, to reframe the conversations you are having with clients and changing the protection market for the better as a result.
We hope you find our latest report insightful.
All figures related to the Vitality Programme are representative of both VitalityLife and VitalityHealth members 1. Based on analysis of members between 2013 - 2019, who moved from 0 to 21+ activity points a week. Physical activity improvements are assumed to be sustained over the individual’s lifetime and applies to standard UK mortality rates.
