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Life Health > Life Insurance

MIB Life Application Activity Level Cools

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U.S. life insurance application activity started to come back to earth in September.

MIB Group says its overall life application activity index was 4.4% higher in September than in September 2019.

That’s the same as 4.4% average for the entire year to date, but it’s down from a year-over-year increase of 14.1% in July, and a year-over-year increase of 9.1% in August.

Resources

  • A copy of the latest MIB life application activity report is available here.
  • A link to the Policygenius Life Insurance Price Index page is available here.
  • An earlier article about the MIB life application activity figures is available here.

MIB is a Braintree, Massachusetts-based organization that helps life and health insurers share some of the information used in insurance underwriting. It bases its life application activity index on member organizations’ application checking volume.

MIB publishes separate data for applicants in three age categories: ages 44 and younger: ages 45 through 59; and ages 60 and older.

Here are the MIB activity numbers for each age group for September:

  • Ages 0-44: Up 7.2%
  • Ages 45-59: Up 4.6%
  • Ages 60 and older: Down 2.5%

One reason for the overall increase in activity may be the attention the COVID-19 pandemic has drawn to the need for life insurance.

Another may be that life insurers have expanded use of fast, simple, all-digital life insurance underwriting procedures, especially for younger consumers.

Older consumers’ application activity level may be down partly because older consumers are reluctant to meet agents in person, and partly because life insurers have been slower to offer the new accelerated underwriting processes to older applicants.

The Policygenius Price Index

Policygenius, a web-based insurance broker, recently started to publish monthly life insurance price reports.

The new price report is the company’s second price report.

The report provides average monthly premium data for 20-year term coverage for applicants ages 25, 35, 45 and 55, broken down by sex, with $250,000, $500,000 and $1 million coverage amounts. There are separate tables for smokers and nonsmokers. Policygenius assumes that the applicants qualify for preferred health pricing.

The lowest price in the new tables, for a 25-year-old female nonsmoker, is $14.22.

The highest price, for a 55-year-old male smoker, is $1,036.76.

The highest price in the tables is 72.9 times higher than the lowest price.

For smokers, for example, the highest-to-lowest gap has widened, to 29.5 to 1, from 28.7 to 1 in September. The spread is 2.8% bigger than it was a month ago.

— Read Strong Term Life Sales Lead to Mixed LIMRA Q2 Numberson ThinkAdvisor.

— Connect with ThinkAdvisor Life/Health on FacebookLinkedIn and Twitter.


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NOT FOR REPRINT

© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.


NOT FOR REPRINT

© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.


NOT FOR REPRINT

© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.


NOT FOR REPRINT

© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.