Moves by people ages 71 and older to buy universal life insurance helped fill the U.S. individual life insurance application pipeline in April.
Individual life application volume climbed 11.7% between April 2020 and April 2021, according to MIB Group Inc.'s new individual life application activity report.
In March, application activity was up 18.5%.
MIB is a Braintree, Massachusetts-based organization that helps insurers in the United States and Canada share some of the information used in life insurance underwriting. It gets its application statistics by seeing how many applications member life insurers have fed through its systems.
Application volume is closely related to policy sales but somewhat different from policy sales. In some cases, life insurers may turn applicants down. In other cases, consumers may decline to pay for the coverage offered.
Older Applicants Return
MIB provides detailed data for members and summary data for the general public. In the summaries, The firm breaks life application activity data down by five age groups. The oldest age group is for consumers ages 71 and older.
From November 2020 through February, application activity for consumers ages 71 and older fell every month.
One reason may have been the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on insurers' sales processes. Many insurers shifted to selling coverage through the telephone and the internet, and away from selling through face-to-face meetings.
Another reason may have been moves by some insurers to tighten underwriting rules in response to the pandemic.
