This is the eighth article in our Expert Underwriting Series. In a complex industry, understanding diverse health conditions and concerns can help you become more efficient and confident in your role as a life underwriter. Check out the full series to get an overview of longstanding and emerging trends in life underwriting and read on to hear from Garen Markarian, Senior Underwriter, on the impact and key considerations associated with epilepsy.
Whether you are a Chief Underwriter, Underwriting Manager or Director, you’ve likely enjoyed a career filled with learning, growth, and stability but, like most roles, some recurring challenges and rote tasks are also part of the picture. Many of which I have experienced myself, having been in an underwriting leadership role for over 15 years. Reflecting on my experience in the industry, I’ve compiled four of the top challenges we, as life underwriting leaders, encounter and outlined some simple ways you and your team can spend less time completing cumbersome, but necessary day-to-day tasks and more time focusing on new business.
Building your ideal team of life underwriters can be intimidating but with the right tools and partners who understand the unique considerations of the industry, it becomes a lot easier. Straightforward yet powerful tools like behavioral metrics are available for managers who are looking to support their team’s career development at the individual level while driving progress toward broader organizational goals. Behavioral metrics also offer actionable insights that can be leveraged to turn your ‘gut feeling’ during hiring or ‘best guess’ in leadership approaches into strategic decision-making and planning that is backed by data about your team members’ motivations, stressors, and communication styles.
Welcome to the seventh edition of our Underwriting Expert Series. Missed the previous articles in the series? View them here! This week, we are excited to share Senior Underwriting Specialist and Claims Manager, Mervyn Gillson’s, perspective on the driving risk of the millennial generation.
Thanks for joining the sixth week of our Underwriting Expert Series. So far, you’ve learned about several key concepts for life underwriters including underwriting mature ages, the impact of marijuana and the opioid crisis on insurance. This week, Senior Underwriter, Elliott Dickson explores abnormal kidney functions in younger ages.
Earlier this month, our team attended the ReFocus 2018 conference in Las Vegas. The conference brings together executives from the life insurance and reinsurance space to discuss challenges faced globally by the industry. This year’s theme focused on the impact of life expectancy and longevity on life insurance and reinsurance. While there were a variety of insightful sessions, the highlights below focus on the digital and technological opportunities discussed at ReFocus 2018.
The content of this article was originally published in The Actuary as Simplifying the Complex: How to speak to nontechnical audiences.
A natural part of anyone’s business career, the further you advance, the broader your audience becomes. And that applies to both formal and informal settings.
As an actuarial student, your primary audience is your boss (an actuary), his or her peers (other actuaries) and your peers (actuarial students). For the most part, this group is homogenous and very similar to you. Thus, it’s not too difficult to prepare to present information to them. You just need to focus on how you want to present the information since, generally speaking, the way you want to present it is the way they want to receive it. Said differently, early in your career you already know your audience well. This is not true, however, as your career advances and your audience gets more diverse.
Welcome to the fifth edition of our Underwriting Expert Series. Missed the previous articles in the series? View them here! This week, Senior Underwriter, Karen McLeod, is discussing the link between obesity and cancer.
This is the fourth edition of our Underwriting Expert Series. Make sure to catch up on the rest of the series here. This week, Senior Underwriter, GarenMarkarian, explores the opioid crisis, how it impacts the life insurance industry and what life underwriters need to consider when assessing applicants with current or past usage.
Thanks for tuning into the third edition of our Underwriting Expert Series. So far, we’ve covered underwriting mature ages and the impact of legalized marijuana on underwriting. This week we are exploring another newsworthy topic that will impact the life insurance industry: genetic testing.
