Individual Life Activity Returns to Pre-Pandemic Earth
MIB says how you see January volume depends on the comparison month.
U.S. individual life insurance application activity was good in January when compared with activity for January 2020, but dull when compared with January 2021.
MIB Group — a Braintree, Massachusetts-based group that helps member life insurers share some of the information used in life insurance underwriting — gives data on life insurers’ return to normal application activity levels in its latest batch of application activity data.
MIB bases its monthly life activity reports on the number of applications that flow through its underwriting systems.
MIB says the overall level of individual application activity was 4.8% lower in January than in January 2021.
But January 2021 activity level was especially high, because life insurers were still dealing with the application backlog created by the upheaval created by the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020.
Activity last month was about the same as activity in January 2019 and in January 2020, before the pandemic changed the business environment, MIB says.
The Details
Here are the activity change figures, broken down by age group, for January:
- Ages zero-30: down 5.9%.
- Ages 31-50: down 3.6%.
- Ages 51-60: down 5.7%.
- Ages 61-70: down 7.1%.
- Ages 71 and older: down 0.2%.
Policygenius Price Index
Policygenius, a life insurance web broker, uses its term life pricing information to provide monthly term life price index reports.
The company bases the index on prices for coverage with a 20-year-level premium term.
The lowest price shown is for coverage for a 25-year-old female nonsmoker who wants $250,000 in death benefits; The highest price is for a 55-year-old male smoker who wants $1 million in death benefits.
Despite theories that COVID-19 mortality might lead to increases in life insurance prices, Policygenius has detected no signs of significant premium increases in the prices the issuers that appear on its site are offering.
This month, the lowest price in the tables fell to $13.90, from $14.23 in January.
The highest price, for the 55-year-old man who smokes, fell to $1,015.73, from $1,021.06.
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