Predictive medical underwriting launched

Johannesburg - One of the obstacles in getting life insurance is medical underwriting, which requires clients to undergo medical tests before they can be offered insurance products.

This causes inconvenience to clients, who often have to set aside time to go through the medical underwriting process.

Absa Life has, therefore, used big data technology to develop an African predictive underwriting solution to increase customer convenience.

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“We have created a way to use customer-level data to predict what the outcome for medical underwriting would be without actually asking the clients to go for medical tests. We have termed this 'Affinity'," explained Jannie Venter, managing executive at Absa Life.

“Instead of doing life insurance the same old way where you pose a lot of medical underwriting questions to the customer, we can offer life insurance to a select number of clients - for up to as much as R5m - with just three questions and there is no need to go for any form of medical test.”

He said the model has been successfully tested and is highly accurate in its predictive underwriting.

The pilot test is complete and the financial planners and advisers at Absa branches in the major central business districts are already offering clients this life insurance solution.

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