For life insurers, year-over-year application activity comparisons are getting to be more difficult — because the market started to rebound so well in late 2020.
MIB Group, a consortium that helps life insurers share some types of underwriting information, says the overall level of individual application activity was 5.9% lower in December 2021 than in December 2020.
That's mainly because December 2020 was a terrific month, and beating the December 2020 activity level was hard, MIB says.
The December activity drop was just 0.4% for the oldest applicants, who are 71 and older, and highest — 9.2% — for applicants ages 61 through 70.
MIB bases the monthly activity figures on the number of applications that flow through its application-checking systems.
MIB also posts annual activity reports. The 2021 annual activity report shows that whole life policies showed more application growth than term life policies or universal life policies did.
