Automated Underwriting for Life Insurance: Lighting Up the Scoreboard
Report Summary
The technologically conservative North American life insurance industry is finally recognizing the value of automated underwriting platforms.
Boston, April 21, 2011 – A new report from Aite Group provides an overview of the automated underwriting platform market, highlights trends in the solution implementations and features offered, and discusses the vendor landscape for automated underwriting platforms serving the North American market. Based on 40 conversations with vendors of solutions and their customers; operational counterparties at insurers, reinsurers, distributors; consultants who have experience implementing and evaluating the solutions; and vendors of complementary solutions such as electronic applications and paramedical services, the report serves as a follow-up and supplement to Aite Group’s March 2010 report, Automated Underwriting for Life Insurance: Driving Scale for New Markets.
Since the mid-1990s, automated underwriting solutions have grown increasingly sophisticated in terms of their user-friendliness and ability to process the types of underwriting data available to them. These solutions hold a great deal of promise for insurers in reducing costs, expediting application cycles, decreasing not-take-out rates, and making it easier to sell policies and reach the underinsured middle market. Nonetheless, North American insurers, generally technologically conservative, have been slower to adopt them than have their counterparts in the U.K., Australia, South Africa, and emerging markets.
“Automated underwriting solutions are gathering steam and credence with North American insurers, and a substantial number of insurers have put muscle and money into their capabilities in order to deliver policies in a cost-effective manner to the vast and collectively underinsured middle market,” says Clark Troy, research director with Aite Group and author of this report. “To that end, many insurers have entered into agreements with providers of automated underwriting solutions for life insurance, and the North American insurance market shows signs of accelerating further into the 21st century.”
Vendors profiled in this report include Accenture, Allfinanz, CSC, DJG Associates, Hannover Re, Infosys-McCamish, MajescoMastek, PlanetSoft, Polaris Software, Resonant Insurance Technologies, RGA, Step Solutions, StoneRiver, Swiss Re, Tata Consultancy Services, and Transamerica Re.
This 28-page Impact Note contains four figures. Clients of Aite Group's Life Insurance service can download the report.