Hartford Life just introduced Issue First, a new way to provide immediate life insurance protection. Get this . . . the policy is issued before underwriting. The upper limit on face value and age is $2 million and 66, respectively, so they are not just targeting small policies or young insurers. The Hartford estimates that [...]

The European Insurance team has been working hard over the Spring and Summer to produce one of our key reports Policy Administration Systems for General Insurers in Europe 2011. It’s a topic of great interest to insurers wanting to replace their core underwriting system, and vendors wanting to have a view of the competitive landscape. [...]

Will automated underwriting systems finally replace the underwriter for term life insurance products? Could these systems be the catalyst that finally allows life insurers to penetrate the ever elusive middle market? I think both answers are “maybe.” Today’s new business and underwriting systems offer broad functionality for the producer and the underwriter. Reflexive electronic applications, [...]

Our esteemed social networking guru, Craig Beattie, circulated a blog posting that he found at http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/features/article.php/12297_3905931_1/Pre-crime-Comes-to-the-HR-Dept.htm It describes an internet company, Social Intelligence that monitors social networks to help companies with hiring decisions. Their data mining tool collects information from the major sites looking for behavior-based information about job applicants and summarizes what is found [...]

My colleagues, Catherine Stagg-Macey and Craig Beattie, released a research report today titled Leveraging Social Networks: An In-Depth View for Insurers. They predict that “insurers will increasingly use public shared data to inform pricing decisions and aid in fraud detection.” They cite several situations where data held on social networks has already been used in [...]