trends

Half of life insurers have some type of automated underwriting solution in place and 41 percent of companies are in the planning process, according to LIMRA research.

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.

RGA's Raimondo Guerra demystifies data and discusses the future of insurance. Questions or comments?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) regularly issues news releases regarding current trends in US population mortality. In June of 2016, articles in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal cited new CDC data from 2015 which showed a rise in the US mortality rate.

(Article begins on page 2)

The Canadian life insurance industry is seeing a wave of innovation across multiple fronts. Evolving customer expectations, shifts in distribution, emerging technologies, big data, and the threat of nontraditional entrants have insurers looking to drastically change the way they do business.

After three visits to Silicon Valley in three months I’ve come to the conclusion that InsurTech for the U.S. life insurance market has arrived. And the Genie isn’t going back into the bottle. U.S. InsurTech financing hit $1.377 billion in 2015, with the global figure about double that (CB Insights). No slowdown occurred in 2016.

Article begins on page 4.

Presentation by Jordi Posthumus on “The Rise of Mobile Computing and Its Impact on Life Underwriting” delivered at the 47th annual M.U.D. Group Conference.

As life claim professionals we must continually be aware of changes and emerging trends within the life insurance industry that may affect claim operations. This article takes a high level look at a few of these trends, focusing on three areas: technology, resources and policies.

Data. Those of us in the insurance industry have always collected data, had access to it, and analyzed it to the best of our abilities. But the amount we are collecting, where it’s coming from, and the way that we collect and manage it, has catapulted us into a whole new stratosphere over recent years. In this new world of harvesting data from an ever-growing number of categories of data and the types of devices generating it, we must focus on the trends that are transforming our industry, and come up with a formula to analyze and make the data actionable for our business.

The primary characteristic I like about so many of the insurtech entrepreneurs that I meet with is that many of them know very little about insurance. While it may sound counterintuitive, that is a good place to start, and offers a refreshing take on an industry that can be stuck in its ways.