Underwriting

Life insurance underwriting isn’t just a job – it’s an art, a science and, at times, a puzzle. To piece together a particularly complex or challenging case, it often makes sense to seek facultative consideration from a reinsurer. Find tips and tools here to make the process easier, including a sample cover letter.

Throughout the years in our columns, I get both regular mail (yes, it still exists) and emails with a variety of questions.  This month would be a good time to share some of these questions (and perhaps make this an occasional column) to address some pertinent things in the current.  After all, questions some of you ask, often many of you have as well…

Facial analytics may play a key role in calculating future life insurance premiums thanks to a North Carolina technology firm claiming its platform returns lifespan estimates more accurate than traditional methods.

This article introduces aortic pulse wave velocity (aPWV) and explains how this new biometric could help underwriters to predict major cardiovascular events and mortality.

Haven Life is leveraging MassMutual's historical data to give instant life insurance approvals. Using AI and machine learning to derive new value from old data could become an enterprise staple.

Slides from presentations delivered at the 2017 Southeastern Home Office Underwriters Association have been posted at the SEHOUA site. Presentations include:

• Analytics – Mind versus Matter
• Pharmacogenetics: Relevant or Not?
• Give Credit Where Credit is Due – The Value of Credit in Life Underwriting
• The Underwriting Profession at Risk: 4 Steps to Manage Career Morbidity
• Underwriting the High Mileage Applicant
• The Meaning of Underwriting
• Life after Bariatric Surgery
• Mental Illness Update

LV= has announced the launch of its new pre-underwriting tool, in partnership with UnderwriteMe, in a bid to improve the underwriting process for advisers.

The VP of Life Insurance for LexisNexis sees great opportunities for new startups in the life space.

Selfies may be most keenly associated with narcissistic young millennials on social media, but they could soon have very serious implications for a person’s future. A company in North Carolina has claimed it can take people’s selfies and use them to predict their life expectancies.

Advances in the treatment of chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) since 2001 have resulted in greatly improved survival for this hematologic neoplasm, which earlier was treatable only with palliative measures or through a highly risky hematopoietic cell transplantation.