In an increasingly complex landscape, strategic partnerships enable insurers to leverage technological innovations, behavioral science, and tailored solutions to enhance underwriting processes, improve customer experience, drive business growth, and create durable competitive advantage.
In the early 20th century, two brothers from Ohio changed the course of history through their unwavering partnership and complementary skills.
Wilbur Wright was a visionary theorist with a gift for abstract thinking. His brother Orville was a hands-on mechanic and natural tinkerer. Together, they achieved what many thought impossible: human flight.
Their partnership serves as a powerful reminder of what can be accomplished when diverse talents unite. The power of partnerships rests in its ability to do more together, to move more quickly and more capably.
The insurance landscape is teeming with partnership opportunities. Choosing the right partner can help an insurer read that landscape, translate insights into workable strategies, and deliver on those strategies through well-practiced solution design. This article explores what the right partner can bring to help accelerate the often-perplexing pace of progress.
A mid-sized American life insurance company known for offering term and whole life insurance products approached RGA with a challenge. It had recently implemented a robust automated underwriting system to make instant decisions on new applications. Cases that did not qualify for immediate approval were kicked out of the system, resulting in a significant number of declines.
The insurer saw an opportunity. While its new technology was helping reduce the strain on its underwriting department, it was rejecting more cases than anticipated.
Company leadership recognized an opportunity to take a second look at lower-risk cases that did not qualify for immediate approval but might otherwise be approved with additional underwriting review.
They turned to RGA’s Strategic Growth Solutions team. This group formed in 2022 to create focus and formality around large, complex client-growth initiatives. The partnership collectively determined that automation rules could be further refined and that additional cases might be approvable with the benefit of RGA underwriting review.
The changes developed through this partnership included:
The result? The insurer was able to issue more policies and cede a portion of the risk to RGA. The insurer also was able to employ a customer-friendly digital interface that resulted in a quick and seamless buying experience.
As with most innovation, initial lessons provide the foundation for new ventures. That first partnership provided a launching point for a subsequent partnership with a mid-sized fraternal life insurer.
In this project, the insurer wanted to review and update their term offering to build traction with new distributors.
Building upon the lessons from the first partnership, RGA this time brought its behavioral science team to the project. Their mission is to understand and adjust to the differences between what people say they do and what they actually do.
This applied expertise led to a revamped customer application that leveraged behavioral science to elicit more accurate, useful responses formatted properly for an automated rules engine.
So successful was this project that RGA now serves as a partner across nearly all aspects of this insurer’s term life business.
RGA’s approach highlights the vital role of partnerships in today’s insurance industry. Done right, a successful partnership is much like the one shared by Orville and Wilbur Wright. It involves using complementary skills to innovate in ways and to degrees neither partner could accomplish on their own.
The power of partnerships can enable insurers to unlock opportunity, move quickly to create market advantage, and embrace the future with confidence.
Learn more about what a partnership with RGA can do to help you grow your business and increase customer satisfaction.
