Life Insurance Industry Gets a Facelift with Increased Technology Use

By Hannah Bond
TMCnet Contributing Writer

Although technology has revolutionized many industries, there are some that haven’t yet found much use for the additional resources that have become available in the last decade or so. One of these industries is life insurance, but that is set to change as insurance agents begin to reap the benefits of technology such as online applications and e-signature capabilities.

Insurance applications are traditionally filled out with a pen and paper, which allows room for error on the part of both the customer buying the insurance and the agent selling it to them. These errors lead to applications being regarded as not-in-good-order (NIGO), something the industry tries its best to avoid. Online applications can help this problem by making the forms easier to navigate and having built-in help or some form of automatic error checking.

According to an article from Insurance & Technology, some carriers are seeing over 90 percent of their new customers doing business through e-applications. While many prefer to use these types of forms, some insurance agents still do prefer writing out the information and solutions exist for these sorts of problems, meaning that agents won’t be forced into technology they’re not comfortable with. For example, MphasiS launched its Insurance Sales Modernization solution earlier this year, which allows insurance agents to fill out forms by hand and have those forms converted into computer-friendly formats.

Other solutions that are improving the life insurance application process include the advent of e-signatures, which allow customers to sign a document without having to print and then mail, scan or fax it. This technology isn’t making quite as big a splash as e-applications, partially due to the newness of the technology and concerns about its legal aspects.

The last innovation that is benefitting life insurance agents is the existence of technology that automatically populates relevant information into forms, reducing the chance of human error.