Nationwide’s Life Insurance Transformation

Nationwide is more than halfway through its multi-year investment designed to transform, enhance and simplify its life insurance business capabilities .

“We’re in year three of a five-year journey to transform our life insurance business to a digital, real-time integrated experience that makes it simpler and more efficient for advisors and their clients. For many, there is still the perception that purchasing life insurance is a time-consuming, intrusive and perhaps expensive process. The changes we’ve made and are making is a more customer-centric, efficient and digitized way of doing so.” – President and COO of financial services at Nationwide, Kirt Walker.

Capabilities include:

Intelligent Underwriting – a streamlined approach introduced two years ago that can provide a faster and more efficient underwriting process. It requires fewer attending physician statements and is an accelerated process for some of the healthiest clients by eliminating medical exams. For advisors it means less time spent on application paperwork, including the need for the advisor to gather the clients’ medical history.

Pending Life Business Online Tracker – a real-time, mobile-friendly dashboard that allows advisors to check the status and information on their pending life insurance cases.

Digital Customer Interview – later this year, the Digital Customer Interview will provide a personalized, digital option for the proposed insured to complete the medical portion of their life insurance application. The assessment is dynamically generated for each proposed insured based on available data. This will provide a third option for the proposed insured to answer medical questions in a way that works best for them: in-person, over the phone and online. The assessment will eliminate the need to schedule a telephone interview or paramedical interview, saving time and allowing flexibility for the proposed insured to complete the assessment when it is most convenient for them.

Bottom Line: according to Celent, insurers that implement technology throughout their new business process see the unit cost per life insurance policy issued drop from $440 to $329.