How to overcome complex COLI/BOLI sales cycles

Complex (com·plex) – adjective. Consisting of many different and connected parts. Hard to separate, analyze or solve. Complicated or intricate.

In a complex sale, the buying process is a long chain of inter-related decisions requiring the buy-in of multiple parties, each with a unique perspective on the situation. This is certainly true of some financial services and products.

Consider corporate-owned life insurance (COLI) and bank-owned life insurance (BOLI), arguably the most complex forms of life insurance. Generally, the sales cycle for any form of insurance or annuity contract that has cash value will be much more complex than that of contracts with no cash value (e.g., immediate annuities or term life).

The rules that pertain to corporate ownership of life insurance are also more difficult than they are for individual or group policies. Likewise, the need for robust pre-sale financial modeling in COLI/BOLI client engagements is far more acute than with simple life insurance products.

A complex set of products

In the COLI/BOLI sales world, there is no cookie-cutter solution. COLI/BOLI can be structured in many ways, limited only by what the client is trying to achieve. COLI/BOLI is most often a cash value-driven product used to informally fund certain employee benefit plans. COLI is also used as a death benefit-driven plan to protect an organization from the death of a key person or to fund shareholder buy-sell agreements in smaller organizations. A consultant/broker works with their client to best match an asset (i.e., a life insurance policy) with a liability need. Plan design, sizing, product configuration, product performance, pricing flexibility, investment options and ease of implementation are all important considerations in this transaction.

What tools can help?

A fully integrated, cloud-based system that offers carriers, brokers/consultants and end customers a suite of best-in-class tools and services is essential in this highly complex and specialized space. Though these tools and services are designed to provide the best user experience for all involved, they also serve as invaluable selling points, simplifying the complex COLI/BOLI sales cycle.

Advanced pre-sale and in-force financial modeling

A comprehensive financial modeling system is absolutely necessary, since valuation and sensitivity analysis are critical objectives in selling and supporting COLI/BOLI relationships. Before the sale, a consultant/broker needs the ability to illustrate both liabilities and the underlying financial product to ensure that insurance products provide adequate coverage of the corporate liability over time. Likewise, an illustration system that handles in-force underwriting classes, product options and features, pricing options, and investment assumptions will optimize results for the client and enhance sales opportunities.

Integration with the policy administration system also allows the illustration system direct access to all historical policy transactions and enables it to provide in-force illustrations on demand and for any point in the policy’s history. The cumbersome manual task of downloading and saving policy values to do in-force illustrations is eliminated.

Online enrollment and e-signature of applications

Once a decision is made on the appropriate insurance product configuration to meet the clients’ needs, the cumbersome but all-important task of issuing the case begins. This normally involves numerous pieces of paperwork for the insureds, consultants/brokers and the carrier.

Each application for insurance, with all the associated state and legal forms, must be assimilated, then signed by the both the insured and the consultant/broker. On a large case involving individual insureds, this task alone can be overwhelming and take weeks, if not months, to complete. However, the process can be simplified if the individual insureds can complete the application online then e-sign, along with the consultant/broker, all the appropriate forms.

New business submission

The last task before a policy is actually issued is the entry of the application into the policy administration system. Typically, this is accomplished through a manual data-entry process. Once again, on a large case with multiple insureds, this process is cumbersome, error-prone and time-consuming.

In an integrated systems environment, the data captured during the online enrollment and e-signature process above feeds the policy administration system automatically, assuring in good order data, elimination of the manual data entry process and significant reduction in the time required to issue new business.

Policy administration agility and accuracy