Sales Growth in Voluntary Benefits Requires New Technology

Carriers in the group life and voluntary lines space are seeing more growth across voluntary benefits than life or annuities products. This may be due in part to the younger members of the workforce, who are being introduced to accident, health, and life insurance via group and voluntary benefits provided by employers rather than via traditional individual channels.

Group life carriers are working to strike a balance between efficiency and meeting basic expectations in areas such as marketing, product design, and enrollment. This has led to insurers providing more voluntary product options to compensate for the reduction in employer-paid insurance products. These voluntary offerings include accidental death and dismemberment, critical illness, and both long-term and short-term disability protection.

Understanding employers and plan sponsors better than the individual participants of these plans comes with risks. Carriers might struggle to retain members, design products effectively, or detect fraud. These challenges are leading voluntary benefits providers to dedicate more resources to leveraging data and analytics.

But analytics aren’t the only technology carriers in this space should be prioritizing. Novarica advises group life and voluntary benefits CIOs to look into a number of approaches to address their unique challenges. Tools to ameliorate the sales process for all stakeholders across a range of devices are becoming crucial. Enrollment and communications with all parties should be possible on any digital device.

Carriers should also be using administration solutions that offer robust functionality such as reporting and analytics to detect sales opportunities based on group trends. Other administration functions include payroll flexibility, porting to other groups, and converting contracts from group to individual. For more information on trends in the group life, annuity, and voluntary benefits market as well as examples of recent technology initiatives in the space, see our report Business and Technology Trends: Group Life/Annuity/Voluntary Benefits.