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April 06, 2023 at 12:55 PM
What You Need to Know
- Overall application flow is up.
- Flow is up for younger people and down for older people.
- For the first quarter, activity is up for all types of products that MIB tracks, but up more for universal life policies.
Strong interest in universal life insurance continued to drive U.S. individual life application activity higher in March, according to new MIB Group data.
MIB is a Braintree, Massachusetts-based group that helps insurers share some of the data used in application underwriting. It bases its monthly activity reports on its own underwriting system activity levels.
MIB application flow was 3.3% higher in March than in March 2022.
MIB shows flow numbers for three major product categories. Universal life application flow soared 21% year-over-year in February, and it increased 15% year-over-year in the first quarter. Application flow increased 5.4% in the first quarter, and whole life application flow increased 3.2%.
What It Means
The popularity of universal life sales may be a sign that clients are facing more than the usual level of tension between fear and optimism.
Universal Life
Life insurers can build universal life policies with adjustable premiums and adjustable benefits levels.
Indexed universal life policies help life insurers use derivatives to hold down investment menu management costs and to increase the death benefits when investment markets do well.
Variable universal life policies tie policy performance to investment market performance without necessarily offering firm, built-in benefits guarantees.
