Cool for cats
Protection Review chief executive Kevin Carr asks whether our love of animals could help the protection market?
Those of you, who know me well, may well know that we recently acquired a cat. I say acquired as it wasn’t something we planned on.
In fact I had no desire to own a pet at all. The last time I had one was when I lived in a pub in Ipswich as a child. We had a crossbreed Labrador called Lee who kept my feet warm at night and inebriated customers at bay at all other times. This was circa 1981. I was six, the Orwell Bridge was being built just up the road and Bobby Robson’s team won the UEFA cup with talented greats such as Brazil, Butcher and Mariner. The builders were partial to a pint or nine so keeping them all in check was no mean feat, although we soon moved to Essex and took the dog to a home. He just couldn’t cope with the smaller house compared to the huge grounds of a pub with three bars.
Then this year I saw a young cat sitting on our window ledge, looking rather cool in the snow. I’d never seen it before so I took a picture. About a week later a neighbour asked if we realised it kept going in and out of our outdoor cupboard. We searched around online, drove through local streets looking for posters and checked with the local vet if it had been micro-chipped. Only then did we realise the cat had been dumped after Christmas and was ‘living’ with us, albeit without us knowing.
Once it became clear that no one would take her in the cat was well and truly acquired. The little nine month old tortoiseshell cat mixed with streaks of ginger and patches of white became known as ‘mixie’ (on the basis that she has lots of mixed colours and patterns) and being responsible new parents we thought we better buy some pet insurance. Well, the nice vet recommended it of course.
Good people those pet insurance advisers we call vets, actually. I’m sure they’ve never heard of ICOBS and they certainly didn’t issue a statement of demands and needs, but they quickly pointed out a few pitfalls about pet insurance that we found very handy – because buying pet insurance is not simple. A bit like protection. I didn’t know, for example, that you can buy short term insurance, which has those nasty PPI-like PECs (pre-existing condition) exclusions or long term insurance where any new problems are covered for much longer. A bit like income protection.
The Which? website in particular was very helpful and a few hours later our cat was insured. Was the cheapest the best? No, of course not. Far from it. A bit like protection, it took a few hours to try and decode all of the options and terminology.
All of which got me thinking. Might some people be more likely to buy protection if it covered their pets as well? I’m sure this has been said before but could there be (is there one already?) an umbrella policy that covers humans and pets living under the same roof with one overall sum assured?
I reckon this might just work and a quick straw poll of people over the recent Easter weekend, mostly younger than I, came in at seven yes’s and one maybe. No doubt there will be good reasons to dismiss the idea – there always are – the policy documents might be a bit long, IFAs might not want to talk about pet insurance, the quote might be a little confusing... But, if it drove demand for more protection these issues can be overcome.
They always can.
So if you’ve got this far without falling asleep that’s cool because talking of falling, some of you may have heard a rumour that I recently damaged my foot whilst iceskating. The truth is that I fell off our garden fence while saving our little lost cat from the nasty car park next door where she seemed to be stuck. Not very cool at all really.
No doubt she wasn’t lost at all. But then why let the facts get in the way of a good story.
Kevin Carr is chief executive of Protection Review
This article first appeared in the Protection Review’s monthly e-PR publication (May 2010)
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