Staying Ahead of Disruption

Digital Disruption

Financial Decision Making: Seamless and on Their Own Terms

Despite the advent of technology across most aspects of our lives, we know that many people still prefer working one-on-one with a financial professional when it comes to making the biggest financial decisions of their lives. Our network of 8,000 financial professionals has long been one of our biggest advantages, as they work each day with five distinct generations of customers to provide a broad portfolio of financial solutions and guidance. Since we find that each of these generations prefers to work differently, we increasingly supplement personal connections with digital options, giving our customers the best of both worlds—a faster, seamless digital experience along with the one-on-one guidance expertise of a financial professional. Digital technology will also allow financial professionals to work more efficiently by digitizing more interactions in one place.

For instance, our new complete, end-to-end digital experience provides a better customer interface and makes our life insurance and investment products more accessible to a broader segment of the population.

Digital Health Profile: Quicker Underwriting, Faster Claims

As a continued expansion of our digital evolution, we launched the Digital Health Profile (DHP) initiative in 2019 to shorten the underwriting process. As customer demands continue to shift, we continue to evolve our process, bringing in digital components where possible to meet expectations. The DHP will allow us to harness the power of digital data to reduce costs, shorten underwriting cycles, and better protect customers.

Algorithmic Underwriting: Better Assessments, Faster Coverage

Algorithms today support underwriting processes and risk assessments, but they also exponentially improve our customers’ experience. As we continue to enhance our digital experiences, our work in data science and rule-based evaluation tools is helping transform a traditionally cumbersome process into an agile and responsive one. By using data science, we can now use application information collected from several sources to determine whether a client can be issued a favorable rate, where appropriate without review by an underwriter. The result is better assessment of risk and a faster process for our customers.

When we started algorithmic underwriting three years ago, we applied it to 10 percent of our applications. Now algorithms assess risk on nearly 75 percent of our applicants—on people up to age 60­—and help make the process of buying life insurance simpler and quicker, with more accurate pricing to help people secure their future and protect the ones they love.