COVER STORY
is an aspirational buyer-seller relationship.
Part of what holds the life insurance industry back when it
comes to adopting the latest innovations is that many carriers
have legacy systems that are 20+ years old. These systems make
it difficult to incorporate new technology and processes in ways
that benefit brokers and their customers.
Prabhu, Pacific Life: Yes, we have made significant strides, and yes,
we are still a step behind. We as an industry have some catch-
up to do. The challenge is both in how the tech industry views
insurance and vice versa. Technology companies sometimes
come across as having a solution that is looking for a problem
to solve. At the same time, the insurance industry needs to do
a better job of articulating a given problem statement. While
cost pressures provide the necessary incentives for incubating
innovation, the regulatory environment makes it easier to retain
our status quo. We need positive action to eliminate/reduce
barriers to innovation in the insurance industry.
Time to embrace Artificial Intelligence
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is getting a lot of attention these days,
the question was raised as to what kind of role it can have in the
life, health, and annuity business.
Technology perspective Distribution perspective
Nielsen, GetInsured: I think we can all agree that it’s time to
kill the wet signature. There have been some great strides -
health is leading the charge and embracing technology. Life
and annuities, for the most part, however, are lagging behind.
Carriers have the potential to realize great benefits from
implementing digital transformation initiatives and designing
end-to-end online processes for appointment, quoting,
enrollment and post-sale support. Ziambras, AIMCOR Group: Artificial intelligence continues to have
significant impact in every industry including ours. Universities
allocate billions of dollars towards creating AI centers and
colleges. The insurance business is about data and statistics,
we have been amassing them for years and now we are gearing
up to find the best way to use them. One could draw a parallel
to saving for retirement all your life and then entering the
decumulation/distribution phase. I don’t think anyone can
dispute the fact that computing power continues to leapfrog
human ability, so the potential multiplier effect in terms of our
ability to predict, analyze, prospect, target market and impact so
many aspects of our business is real and is here, now. But along
with all this comes a variety of ethical and privacy challenges
that the business world will have to navigate through.
“I think we can all agree that it’s
time to kill the wet signature.”
Carsen Nielsen, GetInsured
Wallace, iPipeline: Progress has been made to digitally transform
the life and annuities industry, but we are by no means there.
One of the greatest obstacles to progress is creating and rapidly
deploying products that are easily understood. If you think
about the language of this industry, it can become a major
obstacle to engaging the inexperienced or uninsured buyer.
Simplified products can be quickly built via next-generation
NB&UW platforms, launched, and even instantly issued through
automated underwriting.
Where advancement really needs to be made is in the mining
of in-force data. This is a veritable gold mine of potential
upselling and cross-selling opportunities. Through predictive
10
analytics, insurers can use this data to define client behavior
and proactively predict purchasing needs. When is the last time
you were contacted by the agent who sold you your current
insurance policy? Need I say more?
Security and emerging regulations are another area where
technology really needs to be leveraged to make progress.
Whether we are talking about the prevalence of hackers going
after client data, or new regulations like NY Best Interest 187,
which targets agents and advisors for the suitability and best
interests of clients in life and annuity transactions, BGAs need to
implement supporting technologies to mitigate their risks and
achieve compliance.
Perspectives
Q3 2019
Tattersall, BackNine: AI will continue to provide the entire
insurance supply chain with more information at the right time
to make better decisions. Brokerage adds value by comparing
carriers, so a brokerage’s AI adds value in ways that a carrier’s AI
with a singular focus on their products won’t.
Manufacturing perspective
Manandhar, Legal & General America: AI has been and will
continue to play an important role in the life insurance industry,
especially around utilizing predictive modeling, analytics and
algorithms to streamline underwriting.
In the future, I think we could see something like a “health
score” assigned to individual policy applicants that will allow for
quick and efficient underwriting. This score could be calculated
based on electronic health and lifestyle data made available
with customer permission, paired with the digitization of
medical records. Similar to a credit score, a health score would
allow brokers to cut down on new customer onboarding time
and enable customers to start protecting their families with life
insurance more quickly.
“Computing power continues to
leapfrog human ability, so the potential
multiplier effect in terms of our ability
to predict, target market and impact so
many aspects of our business is real and
is here, now.”
Ziambras, AIMCOR Group
Prabhu, Pacific Life: AI is bound to have positive impact on
insurance processing and can facilitate transforming business
strategy and operations. Less risky solutions, for instance, those
that use handwriting recognition (HWR) technology and AI to
digitize all the forms, have the potential to speed processing
and reducing operational cost. Another area of low risk, but
high impact, is in Fraud Management technology. Investigative
transactional reviews that used to take days can now be
completed in hours and/or minutes using forms of AI —
a game changer.
AI solutions in underwriting are the hard nut to crack, with
questions around bias and so leading to higher scrutiny by
regulators. It is imperative that we start small, gain a level of
understanding to demystify the solution to get buy-in from
regulators. Specifically, PacLife is actively working on digitizing
Attending Physician statements, using Natural Language
Processing (NLP) Technologies a component of AI.
Technology perspective
Nielsen, GetInsured: AI has the potential to save thousands of
hours for underwriting teams and insurance brokers alike.
Imagine underwriting enhanced by AI and applied in real-time
during the quoting process. At GetInsured, we’re currently
developing an AI powered call quality assurance platform which
analyzes entire call recordings in minutes, allowing call centers
and carriers to verify 100% of calls that fall within compliance
and scripts being followed.
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