An older policyholder's best digital channel is often a trusted relative
Insurers keep simplifying their apps for customers in their eighties. For many of those customers the better answer is a relative they have chosen, given limited rights, with consent that someone has actually confirmed.
Nearly three in ten people in Japan are sixty-five or older, and the share of Kotonami's household fire policies held by people over seventy-five rose from 19 per cent in 2015 to 27 per cent in 2025. Every year our digital team proposes ways to bring these policyholders online: larger type, fewer steps, voice guidance, a telephone number on every screen. I support that work and fund it. But evidence from our own contact centre suggested that we had misread the problem, and that the most useful digital service for many older customers would not be used by them at all.
Simpler screens were not the answer
In 2021 we reviewed six months of calls from or about household policyholders over seventy-five. About a third were made not by the policyholder but by a son, a daughter, a niece or a neighbour. Many of those callers could not be helped, because they had no authority to discuss the policy, and our staff, quite rightly, would not discuss it with them. One case stayed with me. A woman living in Tokyo called to report storm damage to her father's house in Ehime. She was asked to have her father call us. Her father was in hospital. Complaints of this kind were running at about 1,900 a year.
The simplified app we were building would not have helped her. Her father was never going to download it, and nothing we could do with type sizes would change that. What he needed was a way to say, in advance and while he could, that his daughter might act for him on certain matters. The digital customer, in other words, was the daughter, and our systems had no place for her.
This is not a small or passing pattern. Japan's older households are increasingly people living alone or as couples, with children in another prefecture. When a typhoon damages a roof in Shikoku, the person who notices first, takes the photographs from a neighbour's message and wants to report the claim is often three hundred kilometres away. An insurer that cannot recognise that person loses days in every claim and leaves families feeling they have been refused for following the rules.
Consent that someone has confirmed
In 2022 we designed a family registration service. A policyholder may nominate up to two relatives. Each relative receives a login of their own and can view the policies the policyholder has chosen, report a claim, upload photographs and follow its progress. They cannot change the cover, cancel a policy or alter the account into which claims are paid. The policyholder can withdraw a nomination at any time, by telephone, through their agency or in writing.
The design arguments were all about consent. Our head of digital wanted relatives to be registered online in minutes, because every extra step loses registrations and the share of customers using our app was one of the company's published measures. Our compliance team worried about relatives registering themselves against a policyholder's wishes. Our claims staff, who see more financial abuse of older people than outsiders imagine, shared that worry. Both sides were right, and there was no design that fully satisfied both.
We decided that no registration would take effect until it had been confirmed by a telephone call to the policyholder or by their agency in person. Registration therefore takes about two weeks rather than minutes, and we gave up the adoption figures an instant process would have produced. The call-back has justified itself. In the first year, two policyholders told us they had not agreed to a registration in their name. Both cases went to our claims and compliance teams, and in one the relative had already tried to change a payment account through the contact centre.
Confirmation at the start is not enough on its own, so the service keeps the policyholder informed afterwards. Whenever a registered relative reports a claim or views a policy for the first time in a year, the policyholder receives a letter, not an email, saying what was done and by whom. Agencies receive the same notice for their own customers. A few relatives found the letters intrusive. Most policyholders told us they were the reason they felt comfortable registering anyone at all, and several agencies now bring the letter to their annual visit as a way to start the conversation.
We were also careful about what the service is not. It is meant for policyholders who can still decide for themselves and want help. It does not replace the adult guardianship system, under which a family court appoints someone to act for a person who can no longer manage their own affairs, and our staff are trained to say so when a caller's situation calls for it.
Keep the telephone and the paper
By March 2026 about 118,000 policyholders had registered a family contact. After the typhoon that crossed Kyushu and Shikoku in August 2024, about 22 per cent of claims from policyholders over seventy-five were reported by a registered relative. Those claims were paid four days faster on average than other claims from the same age group, largely because photographs arrived with the first report rather than a week later. Complaints from relatives who could not be helped fell to about 420 a year.
I do not want to overstate the result. Most older policyholders still prefer the telephone or their agent, and many are perfectly comfortable online. Delegation is not a substitute for those channels; it sits beside them. We kept the paper renewal notice and the agency visit, and we did not reduce telephone staffing to fund the service. If anything, the service made the telephone more useful, because a call from a registered relative can now be answered rather than deflected.
The broader point concerns how insurers measure digital progress. A measure expressed as the share of policyholders who use our app pushes us to move older people onto screens they did not ask for. A measure expressed as the share of claims reported and settled without avoidable delay, by whoever the policyholder trusts, describes what actually matters to them. Since 2024 I have reported the second measure to our board beside the first, and I hope that before long it will replace it.