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Life Health > Life Insurance

MIB Life Application Activity Rises Again

By Allison Bell

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Life insurance application trends looked much stronger for younger U.S. consumers in October than for older consumers.

MIB Group says overall U.S. individual life application activity was 7.6% higher last month than in October 2019.

Resources

  • A copy of the latest MIB life application activity report is available here.
  • An earlier article about the MIB life application activity figures is available here.

That compares with a 4.3% life application activity year-over-year growth rate for the first 10 months of the year, and with a 4.4% year-over-year growth rate for September.

Activity increased in October for consumers ages 59 and younger. Activity for consumers ages 60 and older fell.

Life insurers use MIB to share underwriting information. The Braintree, Massachusetts-based organization publishes life application activity figures based on how often member insurers run applications through MIB application checking systems.

MIB breaks the life application activity volume down by three age groups.

Here are the age group breakdowns for October:

  • Ages 0-44: Up 11.5%
  • Ages 45-59: Up 8.3%
  • Ages 60 and older: Down 3%

One of the factors affecting life application activity is the COVID-19 pandemic, which increased consumers’ interest in life insurance by drawing attention to the risk of premature death.

The pandemic has also affected consumers’ ability to buy life insurance.

Many life insurers have responded to pandemic-related social distancing rules by increasing use of online underwriting processes. The shift toward online processes, and away from in-person meetings, may be boosting sales to younger applicants and hurting sales to older applicants.

Public health officials have reported that COVID-19 has been much more likely to kill older Americans. Some life insurers have reacted to the mortality data by changing prices, benefits and underwriting rules for older life insurance applicants.

— Read Strong Term Life Sales Lead to Mixed LIMRA Q2 Numbers, on ThinkAdvisor.

— Connect with ThinkAdvisor Life/Health on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Allison Bell

Think_Allison

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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.