The First Major UK Insurer to Offer Loss Support at Scale
When we launched in the UK last December, we made a promise: that the standard of support available to families after loss needed to change, and that we were committed to changing it. Today, that commitment takes a significant leap forward. We're proud to announce our partnership with Zurich Insurance Group (SWX:ZURN), one of the world's largest and most respected insurers, bringing Empathy Loss Support™ to three million Life Protection customers across Zurich's Retail Protection and Corporate Risk lines, making Zurich the first major insurer in the UK to offer bereavement support at this scale.
This is a landmark moment for our UK journey, and the scale says it all. With a single partnership, we're reaching millions of customers simultaneously, across individual life protection and employer-sponsored group coverage. Through Empathy Loss Support™, Zurich customers will have access to dedicated Care Managers, personalised care plans, estate administration and probate guidance, secure digital document storage, account closure tools, family collaboration features, and grief resources -helping families save an average of 148 hours of administrative work and around £2,319 in associated costs. And this is just the beginning: LifeVault, our legacy planning platform, will follow later this year, extending Zurich's offering from navigating loss to planning ahead for it.
Our Cost of Loss research makes the need impossible to ignore: a third of bereaved people in the UK feel unsupported during the claims process itself, at the exact moment an insurer has the greatest opportunity to show up. Those who felt well-supported were dramatically more likely to remain loyal to their provider, and 57% of UK adults say they would choose one insurer over another based on the bereavement support on offer. Zurich had already been asking the same questions. Their global research, conducted with YouGov and Stanford University's Professor Jamil Zaki, found that 88% of consumers expect empathy from their insurer, yet only 41% believe they receive it. That gap has driven Zurich to move deliberately beyond traditional insurance cover, and this partnership is where that commitment becomes concrete.
The need to better support families after loss is not unique to any one market - and neither is the gap in how that support is delivered today. Zurich understands that. As a global institution operating across dozens of markets, their decision to lead on this in the UK is a signal of something much bigger to come. For Empathy, it reinforces what has driven our expansion from the US to Canada to the UK: that the need is universal, and we're committed to building a solution that matches it.