Individual Life Application Activity Continues to Rise: MIB
Application counts were up for people in most age groups.
More Americans applied in February to get themselves covered against the risk of death.
Overall life insurance application activity was 7.3% higher last month than in February 2020, according to MIB Group Inc.’s latest individual life application activity report.
In January, life application activity was up 3.9% from a year earlier.
MIB is a Braintree, Massachusetts-based group that helps life insurers share data used in the life insurance underwriting process. Its application activity figures reflect the number of life insurance applications flowing through MIB systems.
MIB publishes a monthly summary that breaks the activity numbers down by age group.
Here are the age group numbers for February:
- Ages 0-30: Up 5.1%
- Ages 31-50: Up 11%
- Ages 51-60: Up 8.4%
- Ages 61-70: Up 4.3%
- Ages 71 and older: Down 6.2%
MIB sells more comprehensive reports, with more types of data tables, to subscribers.
In the summary, MIB said:
- Application counts for term life, universal life and whole life were all up.
- Applications counts for term life and universal life, which tend to provide more life insurance coverage per premium dollar in the short term, were up more than application counts for whole life.
- Activity levels for policies with death benefits under $250,000 were strong.
Strong sales of relatively small term life and universal life policies could reflect changes in how life insurers are selling policies, such as through web-based systems and video conference calls, as well as a COVID-19-driven increase in consumer interest in life insurance.