Message from Troy Haugen, Senior Vice-President, Individual Insurance New Business New Business Now progress update In mid-February we committed to reporting on three time service measures to provide clarity on current service and to help advisors manage client expectations. This first report serves as our benchmark to demonstrate how we’re progressing with New Business Now and is the first in a series you’ll see over the coming months. We continue to process significant amounts of new insurance business. In the first two months of 2015, the total number of insurance applications decided for our three companies was over 16,000. The three time measures you see here are overall averages for our Individual Insurance business across our three companies (Great-West Life, London Life, Canada Life). It’s important to note: - Number of days is business days
- Timelines will vary by product (for example, life insurance vs. disability insurance) and by case size (for example, large cases can be unique and follow a variation of the process).
| In month | 1
Average number of business days from date paper application is received at head office to data entry complete | 2
Average number of business days from data entry complete to underwriting decision for all application types | 3
Average percentage of number of business days from underwriting decision to contract mailed | | | 7 days
or less | 21 days
or less | January
2015 | 4 days | 58 days | 50% | 80% | February
2015 | 3 days | 59 days | 54% | 88% | | • Web applications do not require
data entry at head office
• Includes new applications only
(not re-issued ones)
• Includes preparing applications for
data entry | | • All printed contracts are audited
• Correcting errors delays release
of contracts to advisors and
increases the timeline
|
Clearly, the average time it’s currently taking to process insurance applications is not ideal and there’s significant progress to be made, particularly with the backlog in underwriting. - We’ve substantially increased our underwriting capacity. To date, underwriting staffing has increased by 25 per cent since the start of February.
- We expect to see the number of underwriting decisions increase and timelines improve as additional staff are trained and working at full capacity.
- In February, we made updates to questions in the web applications to help increase the
straight-through processing rate. Additional enhancements are planned for April. - We’re focusing on changes to workflow and processes, training and active management for New Business staff.
We continue to expect the majority of the backlog to be eliminated by mid-year. Our focus is to get your insurance business placed accurately and return to meeting your service expectations. Watch for the next update coming in April. | 
