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By Karen Cutler, Vice President & Chief Underwriter, Individual Insurance

Manulife is introducing automatic underwriting for life and critical illness insurance applications. Here’s what you need to know to be sure you benefit from faster decisions and faster compensation.

Soon, our system will automatically assess clients using a set of “rules” that will allow it to make an underwriting decision without an underwriter seeing the application. It will assess life insurance applications for clients aged 18 to 65 and critical illness applications for clients aged 18 to 40.

Tips for success
How can you be sure your cases will sail through the system? The key is to ensure you answer every question on the application.

If you use our paper application, it will be important to carefully go through the form to make sure all questions are answered while you are with your client and before you submit the form. If you do that, the system will be able to process the application smoothly.

As someone who doesn't like to complete forms, I completely understand why we receive some paper applications that are “not in good order.” Our insurance application is long and it's easy to miss a question.

“Not in good order” applications have always been a problem in our industry. Unfortunately, about 30% of our life and critical illness paper applications are missing important details. This causes delays as we work with you to complete the missing information. Each unanswered or incomplete question creates at least nine additional ‘handlings.’ That’s guaranteed to slow down the process and delay your compensation as we stop to create policy amendments.   

Ez-app can help
To make things easier, you can complete an ez-app online application, rather than paper.

You can use ez-app for life and critical illness insurance and eliminate the need to complete a long paper application. Manulife completes a tele-interview with your client and records the answers for you. That reduces the chance of needing an amendment. You can rest assured that questions will not be missed if you use ez-app.

As we introduce automatic underwriting, remember that a fully completed application is the key to benefiting from faster underwriting and compensation.