As insurers develop accelerated underwriting programs and take steps toward more efficient processes, lower costs, and a streamlined customer experience, innovations across the insurance industry are helping to improve risk insights. It is never too early to start educating yourself and engaging with a partner. Get started with RGA.
It is a transformative time for the life insurance industry as accelerated underwriting promises to reshape the way companies do business.
The goal: to improve underwriting speed and efficiency while also preserving the reliability of the risk assessment process. Amid this dynamic environment, it’s easy for carriers to feel overwhelmed and at risk of being left behind. Fortunately, there is ample opportunity to catch up – and getting started is not as difficult as they might think.
Experts from RGA recently weighed in on the top questions and concerns they field from carriers regarding accelerated underwriting, and they bust some common myths on the topic.
Hardly. A spectrum of resources is available to companies at all phases of the journey to accelerate their underwriting processes. While accelerated underwriting has certainly seen a boom with companies building out programs, there remains an opportunity to implement solutions that will help businesses run more efficiently and improve the customer journey.
With more information available from both traditional and non-traditional sources – motor vehicle records, prescription histories, credit data, etc. – underwriters can now access lengthy histories and view a more dynamic, complete picture of applicants. *Equipping underwriters with tools to access and analyze this additional information is enabling the development of accelerated solutions in which applicants can be underwritten dynamically, based on their behaviors over time, via a more frictionless, consumer-friendly process.
RGA’s 2017 Global Life and Health Underwriting Survey, which surveyed 25 leading life and health insurers from large global, regional, and single market life and health insurance companies, revealed 96% of survey participants indicate a significant or moderate need to improve performance overall, and 68% expect their organizations to make significant or very significant investment in improving efficiency and effectiveness of current processes over the next 3 to 5 years. In addition, the survey results show that there is a widespread belief that to compete, insurers will have to rely less on fully underwritten approaches and, increasingly, on more customer-friendly and efficient underwriting options to win business in the future. Within the next 5 years, 71% of participating insurers reported that they expect the percentage of new business premium that is fully underwritten to decrease or significantly decrease.
For a deeper look at this topic, please see: Trends Point to an Accelerated Future for Risk Selection
As the industry continues to evolve to meet the needs of today’s customer, accelerated underwriting will be a key part of delivering products and tools to customers through a faster, more simplified process. You haven’t missed the boat, but now is definitely the
right time to climb aboard.
- Kathryn Cox, Senior Vice President, Business Development, U.S. Mortality Markets, RGA
Companies are working to implement accelerated underwriting solutions, but there are definitely speed bumps to keep an eye out for. In the next article in this series on acceleration, we will present a roadmap of steps you can take to push acceleration forward in your organization.
Reprinted with permission of ON THE RISK, Journal of the Academy of Life Underwriting (www.ontherisk.com)
As insurers develop accelerated underwriting programs and take steps toward more efficient processes, lower costs, and a streamlined customer experience, innovations across the insurance industry are helping to improve risk insights. It is never too early to start educating yourself and engaging with a partner. Get started with RGA