Last year, we wrote about how buying life insurance with a selfie may become a reality. Well, here we are a year later and you can now get a life insurance quote with a selfie! This new, fun way to get a quote is now available from Legal & General America.
The life insurance approval process has a reputation of being tedious, with some policies taking 70-90 days (or more) to get approved. The requests for medical records can take months to complete. There is a seemingly a never-ending back-and-forth of underwriting questions. As well as completing an application that is up there with the length of many IRS tax forms (and we all know how April 15 is dreaded every year).
Is it a surprise that life insurance sales have been falling?
Due to these difficulties and changing demographics (think millennials) that are the key for continued growth, the industry is primed for some type of disruption. Signs of this are already starting to show and the industry is attempting to reinvent itself, including expanding products that offer e-apps and accelerated underwriting.
However, one of the most interesting ideas on the horizon is buying life insurance with a selfie. While some might think this is all a marketing gimmick geared towards millennials, there is scientific evidence to support a selfie’s use in the life insurance process.
New technology is currently being designed to analyze hundreds of measurements within a selfie. By utilizing Facial Analytics, an insurer can quickly use this information to determine your physiological aging, BMI and then whether you’re aging slower or faster than your physical age. The technology is even progressing to the point where previous tobacco use can be determined. For more information, check out this article from USA Today about buying life insurance with a selfie.
In today’s world, everybody wants everything now. Fast and cheap have seem to become the norm in both personal and business environments. With this new selfie technology, you can see life insurance policies being completed in as little as 10 minutes.
With life insurance sales dropping by 8.3 million individual policies since 1984, you can expect some disruption to occur. By making the life insurance process easier for the consumer and less expensive for the carrier, we may even see sales possibly creeping back up thanks to this new technology.
While the disrupting process is both interesting and scary, some will say it is needed to avoid a complete “Blockbuster” trend in life insurance. With technology evolving and always changing, these new advances will change the entire field of insurance. In order to keep sales afloat, we must consider new ways to make life insurance easier to obtain for the consumer and less expensive for the carrier–the solution to this might just be a selfie.
