Innovation Ambassadors: The expansion of «Spouse Coverage» to same-sex couple In BNP Paribas Cardif Japan

January 29, 2024

In 2023, 84 projects from 24 entities around the world, showing that innovation can be found everywhere at BNP Paribas Cardif! Learn more about how BNP Paribas Cardif Japan has expanded "the coverage of spouses" to include same-sex couples.
 

Introduce yourself briefly: country, division, main tasks, personal interests outside the company (e.g., leisure and hobbies)

I joined product development department of Cardif Japan in 2017. I have been working on FSA (Financial Services Agency) filing creation and negotiations with FSA for product development. 

Hobbies:  like fishing, especially black sea bream.

Tell us about your project: its main focus, what is about, how it came about, and what it will bring to BNP Paribas Cardif. 

What is about?

Currently the CPI  (Credit Protection Insurance) spousal rider is applicable only for those who are in marital relationship, but in this new product, creditor's same-sex partner can be enrolled as a spouse (*in Japan same-sex marriage is not allowed). 
This is the first CPI product in Japan that covers same-sex partners as spouses.

How it came about?

As seen in the trend of local governments adopting the "partnership certification” (*described later), there is a movement in society to respect the rights of sexual minorities such as LGBT. 

In such circumstances, our partner banks have gradually started to expand their services to LGBT people.

As a mortgage CPI supplier, we need to support our partner banks and provide the product covering such a customer diversity.

What will it bring to BNP Paribas Cardif?

Expansion of the coverage to same-sex partner meets our mission, “Making insurance more accessible”.

Through this product, our partner banks can expand their mortgage customer base including LGBT community.

Also partner banks can utilize as a competitive advantage in the market, as they need a differentiator especially in such a low interest situation right now. 
Furthermore, they can easily introduce this product with low implementation cost. 

More than 10 partner banks launched this product, which contributes to strengthen the partner relationship. 

What did you find most striking/surprising during this project (perhaps you have an anecdote to tell us)? 

Regarding the rights of sexual minorities, advanced countries/regions have already established laws that prohibit discrimination and guarantee the rights of same-sex couples. 

However, Japan is behind in such trends, and this is why we had several roadblocks through this product development. Under such circumstances, we decided to expand the scope of insured persons and spouses for TD (Temporary Disability) spouse riders to cover more LGBT people. One of the challenges is how to validate the same-sex couples when they raise insurance claims, and the solution we defined is to use “partnership certification”, which officially certifies family relationships between same-sex partners by local government. Even though not all the local government publishes the certification, it is recently spreading out rapidly among local municipalities. With those various efforts, we finally launched this product which has been widely accepted by partner banks which can introduce with low cost.

What advice would you give to employees who also want to innovate? 

It may be a fundamental point of working together, but sometimes we can realize something new through chatting with other people. Such daily communication could be a trigger of generating good ideas.