Life Insurance and Annuities on the 2024 Rollercoaster

Embracing digital business practices — everything from E-applications at the beginning of the value chain, to the automated underwriting on the part of the carrier, through the electronic delivery of the policy — is increasingly important in being able to match customers' needs and complete sales.

Aside from the cost of a policy, LIMRA reports that the main obstacle to purchasing life insurance is confusion, and, specifically, a lack of understanding on the part of consumers when it comes to what they actually need and how these financial products function.

This evidences the urgent need for the industry as a whole to prioritize demystifying and decomplicating the buying process.

Before we can close the life insurance gap, we have to first close the education gap.

And technology has a huge role to play here — particularly on the part of clear data and illustrations technology.

Making Life Insurance and Annuities More Understandable

Modern digital illustration software can help manufacturers and distributors simplify the understanding of complex financial products for clients by using imagery to game real-time scenarios and predictive analyses.

These tools also help advisors to quickly provide more accurate and tailored recommendations.

Moving beyond traditional sales methods, these digital sales platforms enable interactive and engaging experiences to significantly improve consumer education and self-service decision-making processes.

Technology advancements are critical to making life insurance more accessible and understandable, ultimately driving higher adoption rates, and closing both the education and life insurance gaps.

What's more, most consumers today do not want to talk to an agent or advisor about purchasing a policy.

Buying habits across all industries have changed, and insurance is not exempt.

Buyers of all ages now welcome a digital customer journey, and they want to see both education and personalization as part of that process.

To do this effectively, all parties across the value chain must be connected by digitized, truly integrated workflows, because, without connection and simplicity, reaching all corners of the industry on the back end, experiences on the front end will fail to meet expectations.

Capturing High-Volume Business

Life insurance growth potential and a continued annuities boom are good news for the industry, but those that may struggle include carriers or distributors who lack the systems, staff, or efficiency to capture this expanding opportunity.

Today, the market's priority is being able to embrace volume.

For carriers, this means focusing on attracting distributors' business by speeding up the time to decision at every touchpoint.

Automated underwriting is playing a key role here.

For agents and advisors, what matters is eliminating manual processes that cause bottlenecks, and, by doing so, keeping customers that may be lost to a lengthy sales process. Digitization must remain a focus on all sides in order to unlock the shortened cycle times that benefit all parties, while reducing costs and errors.

But not all digitization is equal.

The entire industry must work together to ensure that efforts to automate and streamline do not result in siloed, fragmented systems that present the same inefficiency problems in a different form.

Competitive Drive Set to Disrupt

For too long, the L&A industry has generally found it acceptable to live with dated technology and tools in comparison to other sectors that have modernized, and providers have been putting the same offerings out to the market without innovative approaches that match consumer needs.

Today, however, we are seeing a newfound competitive spirit take hold in the space, bringing with it an urgency to finally move forward.

Increased opportunity, a large, untapped market, a lack of willingness to accept clunky processes and shifting societal expectations have caused us to arrive at an inflection point.

The industry's desire to deploy more current technology to support business imperatives has finally outgrown its resistance to change. However, the reality is the L&A industry is still early in its technology journey.

There is much to be done, so it's anyone's game to win.

Pat O'Donnell is the chief executive officer of iPipeline.