The CUNA Mutual Group, which offers life insurance policies online or over the telephone in minutes, has composed more than $500 million in policies in under a year by its TruStage Simplified-Issue Term Life Insurance, winning a Model Insurer Award from Celent, the financial technology research team. The Model Insurer Awards recognize how insurers are using technologies like business computer support and private cloud computing to change the face of the business. Donald Light, manager of Celent states that the Model Insurer Award winners combine best practice implementations with significant impacts on business results. The entrance from TruStage demonstrated both facets.
Founded over 80 years ago by credit union leaders looking to provide insurance to credit union members and others in the American mid-market, whom it always refers to as hard-working, CUNA Mutual Group established the TruStage online term life insurance policy in November 2016 as one of the first insurers into the market with a term life insurance product that customers can purchase entirely online. The typical TruStage buyer is in her mid-forties (60 percent are female), makes $58,000 and buys roughly $50,000 to $55,000 in insurance, said Susan Sachatello, senior vice president in TruStage. This is the customer they were planning for.
It’s also a customer that a builders and home indemnity insurance company with a traditional salesforce and older, expensive legacy technology may have difficulty reaching profitably. CUNA Mutual Group utilizes Ebix, a worldwide fintech firm which digitizes all of the information and issues the policy and RGA for underwriting and scoring. Many of CUNA’s prospective clients know little about insurance and anticipate It to be 250 percent more costly than it truly is, said Sachatello. The business has developed a sales process to give a modest digital hand-holding. So the first question CUNA Mutual asks for is the beneficiary’s name, which response remains prominently displayed throughout the procedure to remind applicants why they need life insurance.
The next question is if the applicant can’t work because of a chronic medical condition or injury, the next is if the applicant has been diagnosed with any of a list of health conditions and the fourth is a petition for permission to pull the applicant’s prescription history. While the average time to get a carrier to reach a decision on life insurance Is 11 days, CUNA aims for 11 minutes and is hitting goal, Sachatello explained, and that decision simplifies policy. The company is based on its technology partners for the decisions right, she added. Unlike many companies that begin by asking the quantity of coverage an applicant wants, it asks what a customer can afford over time.
They want to celebrate their getting started with security for their family, not make them feel that they are not doing enough. Their held belief is that helping families begins is stepping in to helping them build financial security, and they frequently come back to purchase additional coverage. It provides up to $100,000 but anticipates the upper limit to rise to $300,000 by the end of the year. Additionally, it provides whole life and more complicated policies for people whose preexisting conditions do not qualify them for the Simplified Term Life. “In life insurance, you price once and live with that decision for many years.”
CUNA Mutual Group’s used agile development to design the program for mobile first and is continually searching for ways to enhance it by taking a step further into business IT and cloud computing solutions. Does the company need a complete Social Security number or just the last four digits, for instance. About 75 percent of its policies are auto-decisioned and CUNA expects that to achieve 95 percent by end of year. Some are finished by call center reps that are paid a combination of salary and incentives.
According to Sachatello, their main competition is procrastination. By making the process easy, CUNA helps clients check off one more thing in their household financial planning to-do list. The very real market’s need for clear, affordable and readily accessible life insurance is clearly being met by a rapid adoption of TruStage’s term life product.
Protecting over 18 million members, TruStage insurance products and programs include automobile, home, life, accidental death and dismemberment and health insurance. It is yet to be seen whether constructions and owner builder insurance will be the next leader in utilizing technology to enhance their financial services.
