technology

The marriage between technology and faster underwriting is a union the life insurance industry has encouraged for many years. Progress has been slow, but MIB Group is making headway, recently signing an agreement with Epic to utilize its electronic health records system.

The digitization of the life and health insurance business is happening at breathtaking speed. With that, the policy application and underwriting processes are being brought to the attention of people who used to be less concerned with them - such as actuaries, marketing folks and product managers.

Technological advances in biosensors and increasing amounts of heart rate data from wearable devices and electronic health records are leading to the development of more sophisticated underwriting algorithms. This data, when coupled with robust epidemiological evidence about the prognostic value of heart rate, may improve insurer understanding of cardiovascular risk and ultimately allow underwriters to better predict morbidity and mortality risk.

With advancing technology and evolving underwriting tools, it may be easy to overlook what has now become an “old standard”, the World Wide Web. 

A half century ago, physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn first coined the phrase “paradigm shift” to describe a fundamental change in assumptions. The term has since been over-applied to everything  from economics to politics – even becoming the title of an episode of Star Trek! Yet while so often misused,  I believe the term paradigm shift perfectly describes what is happening in underwriting today.

Wearables introduce a multitude of ways to monitor health. The quality and quantity of information supplied by wearables will transform how we manage our lives. There is a huge opportunity for life insurance companies to change the way we interact with our customers and to improve how we manage risk.

New global research released by Vitality, a leading behavior change platform, reveals that financial incentives combined with wearables encourage people to significantly increase their physical activity.

Could 2019 be the year of an underwriting technology transformation? We’re not yet ready to make that prediction, but we do see the makings of a transformation, as more insurers invest in technologies that they believe will deliver solid returns to their top and bottom lines. In fact, underwriting is the second-largest category within the growing life insurtech investment sector.

Can machines learn? RGA Senior Data Scientist Dr. Dihui Lai thinks so, and he should know. Lai recently unveiled an RGA-developed “AI-Augmented” underwriting system at the Society of Actuaries Predictive Analytics Symposium and took a few moments to explain the results.

Customers can withhold their fitness data, but that will result in higher premiums, which may put life insurance out of reach for low-income earners. This in turn could have an impact on whether would-be homeowners can take out mortgages, some of which can require a life insurance policy on the principle borrower.