Hello again, and welcome to another newsletter to keep you up to date on the progress with Tele-Interviewing and MorganAsh. 2007 was a great year for us. We increased our interview rate and capacity by 250%, while improving our quality, and maintaining our turn round times. Turn round times were sub par in Q4 but this has now been rectified. Our customers are reducing the dependence on doctors’ reports, thus saving cost and more importantly, processing time. With the good data now collected, the reinsurers are amending the medical limits, and reducing their rates where our full nurse Tele-interviewing is being deployed.
The battle to improve industry reve-nues, by improving consumer trust is making progress, with some real action on reducing the non-disclosure problem. The recent UK ABI guidance on the treatment of claims should change the way we cost non-disclosure, and Swiss Re have announced their strategy to remove the advisor from collecting medical information.
We have retained our record of ZERO contested claims to date now on over 30,000 interviews. While it is unlikely this statistic will remain at zero indefinitely, there is growing confidence that we are making a
major impact on reducing the non-disclosure problem.
Our strategy is not only to reduce non-disclosure, but to make buying protection easier. Our target is to be able to interview, underwrite and offer terms for 90% of applications within 10 days.
We launched Tele-Interviewing in Germany and we launched our Tele-Claims service in the UK & Ireland in partnership with SCOR Global Life. We have extended our partner-ship with RGA Technology partners, and will be offering more of the AURA functionality as a hosted environment.
Our seminar in Gatwick in November was a great success with 80 attendees. We would like to thank all our customers who presented there. We are keen to hear from you on preferences and topics for future events.
We are delighted to hear that we have been nominated for “Best New Initiative” along with Royal Liver, Legal & General, Pioneer and Axa, in the LifeSearch Protection awards, at the end of February.
We include several articles, some case studies and some further information on services within; we trust this is of interest.
Andrew Gething
Welcome
Jan/Feb 2008
Special points of
interest:
ZERO contested claimsto-date
MorganAsh grow at 250% Material NDL on
Morga-nAsh Tele-Interviewing 1% - 2% for Life & CI Tele-Claims service
launched
Hosted AURA launched
Measuring Information quality 2 Case Study NFUM 3 Analysis of NDL within interviews 4 When are the
inter-views? 5 Case Study
Canada Life Europe 6 Tele-Claims 7
Hosted AURA services 8
Training courses 9 Case Study Friends Provident 10 Tele-Data Capture, Electronic Signatures 11 Seminars 12 Report on 2007 13 Inside this issue:
MorganAsh News
“We, as brokers, should not be taking the liability, or bearing the costs, for the medical interviews, and
when product providers take control of the interviews, they can tune these to their underwriting
philosophy and extend the interviews to collect all medical information, thus reducing GPRs and improving disclosure further. This has to be the better
way.”
Page 2 MorganAsh News
While the above compares the different sources of infor-mation, there is still the question of what is the abso-lute. One way to measure this is to compare specific answers to specific questions against national averages. The graph below shows the mean percentage of smok-ers (including those who use nicotine patches) for each company.
There is minimal difference between the differing ques-tions used in the interviews and hence these are not stated separately.
There is a large range of percentage of smokers be-tween companies. This is mainly due to some compa-nies only using a discretionary approach, or due to some pre-selection at the point of sale prior to inter-view.
It is known that reinsurers typically quote their books experience of between [10%-15%] smokers, and hence this is assumed to be the mean from previous insurance applications. In comparison, we are reporting a mean of 16.5% smokers.
In the UK the percentage of smokers is ~25%, although this does vary with age and gender. Most of the compa-nies in the graph below whose mean smokers is in the 20-25% range are undertaking Big T Tele-interviewing (i.e. all applications are interviewed) in a direct channel (often bank assurance).
It will be interesting to compare these figures with those companies using more simplistic forms of Tele-interviewing, and those using administration staff, for this simple smoking question, as well as more complex medical questions. We will continue to do more work in comparing our results in collecting information, com-pared to other sources, as well as the absolute values. We have always known that the quality of the
information from our interviews is far superior to that collected from traditional paper applications, or from electronic paper systems. Previous pub-lished surveys have detailed these differences, and ongoing comparisons from companies con-stantly confirm this.
Traditionally the industry has held the GPR as the gold standard and hence compared our non-disclosure figures against the GPR. This, how-ever, is misleading.
The graph above summarises the results from many compa-nies. The results confirm that the GPR, while being better than an application form, is still inferior to our full nurse Tele-Interview. Although only from a few studies, the consistent pic-ture is that for Life & CI mate-rial non-disclosure from the MorganAsh Tele-Interview is 1-2%, compared to 6% non-disclosure on the GPR.
The aim is to be selective in our use of the GPR to supplement the Interview.
Pe rce ntage s m ok e rs pe r com pany
0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 UK national average Mean f or all companies Mean per company
Measuring information quality
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% A pplication f orm GPR Tele-Interview Non-Dis clos ure by s ource
Material ND (lif e & CI) Material NDL (IP) Total NDL
Consolidated view of non-disclosure by source. For applica-tion forms, UK GPRs and MorganAsh Tele-Interviews. From various studies by MorganAsh clients. Sample size
The National Farmers Union Mutual (NFUM) sell their protection products across their tied agency network of 350 agents. On the general side the agents transact the business themselves but with regard to life they act as introducers to the 120 Financial Consultants.
Over 90% of NFUM customers have more than one insurance product from NFUM, and their customer loyalty is probably the best in the in-dustry. However, the sales of protection are far lower. NFUM hence took a strategic move to upgrade their protection business, with a con-certed effort to improve sales and penetration across the loyal NFUM customers.
The first goal to improve sales was to remove the barriers to selling, notably the long turn round times of an average of 3 months, inconvenience and resistance to selling protection.
NFUM decided to move to Tele-Interviewing and, after an extensive review of the market, selected MorganAsh to provide its Tele-Interviewing ser-vices.
MorganAsh commenced Tele-Interviewing on the 1stAugust 2007 and immediately improved the process. All applicants are interviewed over the phone about their health by the MorganAsh nurses in a confidential situation and at a con-venient time for them.
Due to the existing poor confidence in protection, NFUM used the launch of Tele-Interviewing as a catalyst to re-launch the protection sales. They embarked on a communication campaign to the field sales force telling them of the improvements on the way, and the benefits Tele-interviewing will bring. This was branded with the slogan:
Case study
National Farmers Union Mutual
“To support Tele-underwriting and to ensure that we were able to act on the report alone, our reinsurers approved major
changes to our medical limits thus reducing further, the need for independent evidence'”
Sean McCarthy; Life Underwriting Manager, NFUM “Life Getting Easier/We’re Coming to You”.
Percentage of GPRs required 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% Pre-Tele-Interview Post-Tele-Interviewing
Although NFUM have their roots in farming, they now service a wider clientele from the rural community. NFUM applicants are hence, typically older than most protection providers. However, the information gath-ered by MorganAsh is so superior compared with previ-ous approaches that NFUM have managed to reduce their requirement for GPRs from 48% to 23%.
Applications can now be underwritten from the inter-view alone from 74% of applications, up from 46% of applications before MorganAsh Tele-Interviewing was adopted.
The net effect of the improved new business process is that NFUM has already halved the mean turn round time from 63 to 37 days, and revenues have risen sig-nificantly.
NFUM hit targets set by their Board for the process-ing of protection business for the first time ever in late 2007, they issued 58% of business within 30 days (target 50%) and 96% within 90 days (target 90%). In addition, in 2007 they issued 128% of the total issued 2006 protection policies.
Although there have been many changes made to the overall protection process there is no doubting the central role that Tele-underwriting played or the impetus it instilled.
Pe rce ntage of cas e s not re quiring furthe r inform ation
0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80%
Page 4 MorganAsh News
As we have said many times, MorganAsh have proven, that the quality of information obtained through our nurse Tele- interviews greatly ex-ceeds that obtained on a paper or e-application. But is the Tele-interview the Holy Grail? Well, we are undertaking analysis to try and establish what, if any, non disclosure still exists with Tele-interviewing.
We have worked with four clients investigating the quality of information provided to them through the MorganAsh Tele-interview, in com-parison to what they have discovered on a full GPR. The cases numbered around 400 (included Life, CI and IP). The results for this relatively small batch of cases show up some interesting results:
All non disclosure (i.e. whether significant or not) was around 20% on Tele-interview. This compared very favourably indeed with the 69% figure that was the average figure found on paper application.
The significant non disclosure (in our analy-sis this was judged to be anything that would change the underwriting decision by +50 or more) on TI was, on average, 6.4% which was a great improvement on the 29% average found on application.
The significant non disclosure levels vary by product, and in this small study, looked to be around 1-2% for Life business and around 8% for IP.
A study by AXA is close to these results. Their material non disclosure on TI is 1.23%. (although brokers can pre-select what is interviewed). Their total disclosure on TI is reported to be16 times better than on application, again similar to our results. So what about the significant non disclosure that still exists on the interview? We reviewed the Tele-interview report and recording against the GPRs.
Significant non disclosure on the Tele-interview in-cluded:
For IP business females were more likely than males
Younger lives seem more prone to serious non disclosure, the non disclosure on older lives more often being less significant
Certain occupations (IP) appeared to be suscepti-ble to non disclosure e.g. nurse, social worker, teacher, financial services!
We also looked at what conditions/events were most of-ten non disclosed. It is highly relevant that the majority of the cases analysed were for IP. These were the more frequently seen offenders:
Stress/low mood/depression/ODs
Back/hip/shoulder pain
Tiredness/post viral fatigue
Gynaecological problems Migraine Skin problems Costochondritis Sports injuries Vertigo Paraesthesia
We investigated the way the call had been handled, if there were pauses, inconsistencies, changes of answer etc. What we found was that the information given was usually erroneous in sev-eral different instances. The appli-cant had chosen to withhold the information on more than one occa-sion and had been resilient to “prompts”. We found that, reassur-ingly, the nurse had generally done a very good job.
Some cases when coming to claim may be clearly refutable whilst a small number may still cause dis-pute.
To date we have no claims on Tele-interviewed business which have had disputed non disclosure arising.
Analysis of Non
-
Disclosure within
Interviews
MORGANASH NE WS
“One year ago, we commenced Big T tele-interviewing on our IP business through two of
our largest business partners, with MorganAsh. So far, we have experienced a
high level of positive customer satisfaction and no contested claims to date. The incidences of serious non-disclosure that would have altered the underwriting terms
offered have been halved. Jon Parker
Chief Medical Underwriter
What if anything can be done about the small remaining non disclosure?
Our study has shown there are some small enhancements we can make to our questions (which have been implemented) and we are looking at fraud de-tection techniques and technolo-gies.
We are already using certain tactics in our conversation man-agement and we are investing in further expert training from fraud detection specialists.
We continue to closely monitor the non disclosure and output from our clients and ask all our customers to share with us their findings so we can con-tinue to reduce the levels and increase the percentage of valid claims paid.
If you have any examples of non disclosure being found on the Tele-interview, then do please let us know so that we can include this in this study.
Analysis of Non-Disclosure within
Interviews
(continued)
0.00% 0.50% 1.00% 1.50% 2.00% 2.50% 3.00% 7.00 9.00 11.00 13.00 15.00 17.00 19.00 21.00 23.00 Mon - Thur Friday SaturdayWhen are the Interviews?
The graph above shows the times of day Tele-interviews are undertaken. The data is from over 20,000 interviews across multiple compa-nies, for varying products and distributions chan-nels during 2007.
The graph shows the time of the completion of the interviews, and is split to the mean for Mon-days to ThursMon-days and for SaturMon-days and FriMon-days separately. Mondays to Thursdays being similar in their distribution through the day.
MorganAsh official opening hours are: Mon– Thurs: 9.00am - 9.00pm Friday: 9.00am - 5.00pm Saturdays: 10.00am -4.00pm
Tele-Interviews are undertaken outside these official hours, on a discretionary basis. In 2007, 6.3% of inter-views were taken outside official hours, with 2.3% on Sundays (not shown).
“The new Tele-interviewing service will speed up processing which will benefit advisers and it will enable us to gather more detailed information about the applicant’s health. This will benefit the
customer as it means we can make a more informed underwriting decision. Most importantly,
there is less chance that a claim will be disputed and we believe this will reduce non-disclosure.” Mark Jones, protection products and actuarial manager, Friends Provident
Page 6 MorganAsh News
Canada Life Europe is one of the first life insurers to offer full Tele-interviewing for its applicants in Germany. After a successful pilot on the critical illness product in 2007, Canada Life Europe, based in Dublin, Ireland, is now rolling out full Tele-interviewing across all products and all dis-tribution channels throughout 2008.
Brokers benefit from reduced administration time, the removal of having to ask sensitive ques-tions relating to the clients health and a reduc-tion in liability for the accuracy and completeness of health related disclosures.
MorganAsh worked with Canada Life and SCOR Global Life in Cologne in developing the Tele-interview service for the German Market. SCOR provided advice and guidance on adapting the Tele-interviewing process as well as obtaining legal advice on the past and recent insurance law. The success of the pilot was greatly down to the good working relationship of all three partici-pants. SCOR underwriters in Germany were drafted in to undertake the quality assurance work on the interviews. This unusual step gave SCOR unparalleled experience in
Tele-Interviewing, as well as giving MorganAsh an extra impartial quality process. Although labour intensive, this was a great success and the learn-ing curve really helped the project.
For SCOR this has given them great real life ex-perience in Tele-interviewing that they can now bring to their clients.
Interviews were undertaken from both the UK and Germany for the pilot, although in the future all interviews will be undertaken in Germany.
Case study
Canada Life Europe
MORGANASH NE WS
MorganAsh worked out of the SCOR office in Cologne for the pilot, and in February 2008 will be opening their own office in Cologne.
The differences in Tele-interviewing between the UK, Ireland and Germany are few. The main difference is in the length of the interviews due to a more verbose Ger-man language. Otherwise all the benefits of reduced application time, improved information and reduced non-disclosure are the same as experienced in the UK and Ireland.
The timing could not be better. New insurance law is introduced from 1stJanuary 2008. Known as the VVG Reform the changes in law are similar to that being introduced by the FOS and law commission in the UK. Greater responsibility for collecting information on ap-plicant's medical history now rest with the insurer and broker. The reform of the European Union Insurance Intermediaries Directive increases the liability of the broker if they continue to collect the medical informa-tion. The change of the insurance contract law (VVG reform) restricts the consequences in case of non-disclosure within five years.
MorganAsh systems are web-enabled enabling all the existing systems and processes to be used. English scripts were translated into German within AURA, and then MorganAsh worked with SCOR and Canada Life to tailor these for the German market.
Canada Life will roll out Tele-interviewing across all products over 2008, gradually bringing on each broker in a phased manner.
MorganAsh are already in talks with other German companies and expect to start further pilots in Q2 2008.
“Tele-underwriting almost halved the turn around time from application to policy issue”
Günther Soboll, Principal Representative of Canada Life Europe in Germany.
“There is no doubt which information is required and possible additional queries can be asked and clarified
right there and then”
Günther Soboll, Principal Representative of Canada Life Europe in Germany.
"“"The timing for introducing Tele-Underwriting could not be better, as it solves many of the liability issue for the Broker
from the VVG reform.”
Thomas Bornemann; SCOR Global Life (Germany)
Enquirer’s from German & Austria should con-tact Andrea Sparrow on:
MorganAsh Media Park Büros Hansaring 61 50670 Köln [email protected] +49 (0)800 1013199
SCOR Global Life (UK) and MorganAsh have de-veloped an industry-leading Tele-claims service which improves the claims process for both claim-ants and insurers.
At the start of the claims process an experienced nurse undertakes a high quality interview to tri-age the claim. This ensures that genuine claims are paid quickly, claimants are handled sympa-thetically and evidence is targeted appropriately
SCOR are re-entering the Income Protection
mar-Ann Marie Dec of SCOR and Jill Harvey of MorganAsh have compiled the interview scripts, which are built within the AURA rules engine.
Scripts for Income Protection both for occupation and Activities of Daily Work (ADW) are already prepared. Scripts for CI will be available in Q2.
The service is easily customised to individual customer needs.
The claims service is offered with a minimum monthly fee. Unfortunately unlike the Tele-Interview service, VAT is chargeable.
The service goes live on 1st April 08.
Tele-Claims
"““SCOR Global Life are proud to be working with MorganAsh in the development of their industry-leading
service. The service will provide a better experience for consumers by paying valid claims quicker and more accurately identifying the claimants for rehabilitation. The improved morbidity experience will lead to reduced
premium rates and help stimulate the market.” Steve Maybury, Head of Underwriting, Claims & Marketing, SCOR Global Life UK
ket and the tie up with the MorganAsh Tele-Claims ser-vices is a real differentiator and value add for their cus-tomers. It will be an integral part of the reinsurance proposition and will poten-tially provide significant re-ductions in reinsurance rates for leading insurers, and ulti-mately reduced rates for their customers.
Customers will be able to download the interview re-ports in PDF format, and listen to the interviews in MP3 format within hours of the interviews being com-pleted.
Existing experienced Morga-nAsh Tele-Interview nurses have been specially trained for the service now managed by Kay Haighton-Lloyd.
The
process:- Reduces the need for cumbersome claims forms, and the arduous process of sending letters back and forth to applicants, hence reducing costs.
Is independent of the GP.
Quickly removes the stress to the claimant, im-proving customer satisfaction and retention.
Page 8 MorganAsh News
MorganAsh have extended their strategic alliance with RGA Technology Partners (RTP) to offer the AURA suite of products on a hosted basis.
Rather than having to undertake risky IT projects to build in-house underwriting processes, clients will be able to simply log on and rent the services from MorganAsh.
RTP is strategically partnering with service com-panies to offer this service globally. The first partnership with MorganAsh started this process.
The AURA back office suite enables the manage-ment of the new business process
including:- Receiving the Tele-interview report
Automating underwriting decisions
Managing the collection of medical
evi-dence
Managing the manual underwriting of
cases
Generating correspondence
Rich MI on every process step
MorganAsh to provide hosted
“Using AURA in a hosted environment is a great solution for small companies”
Mark Friedel Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer RGA Technology Partners.
“Our strategy is to grow with partners as they offer AURA as both a service and a hosted environment." Jym Barnes President and Chief Executive Officer RGA Technology Partners.
MorganAsh are working with RTP to develop various aspects of the software and the service and will offer a standard “out of the box” service. For the smaller com-panies who are presently operating mostly paper proc-esses, they will be able to take the standard system, saving themselves the hurdle of licensing and internal IT set up costs.
The system can be tailored for individual customers. For larger companies it is anticipated that there will be some level of IT integration work to link into existing systems. But this amount of IT work will be minimal compared to the traditional approach of building sys-tems in–house. 90% of the syssys-tems do the same proc-esses, yet the industry spends fortunes building and rebuilding these systems in-house.
MorganAsh host the AURA suite within a secure re-mote data centre, with contracts with third parties to manage the hardware and back up environments. RTP and MorganAsh are presently working on a num-ber of features to improve the automation rates of Tele-underwriting, and the efficiency of Tele-Interviewing and customer services.
All this is integrated with the Tele-Interviewing services from MorganAsh. Customers are charged on a transaction basis, as part of the Tele-Underwriting service. This has the advantage of costs being in proportion to revenues, as well as being exempt from VAT (UK Only). All too often improvements to new busi-ness processes are delayed or not imple-mented because internal IT resources are prioritised to other parts of the business. The result is that many protection busi-ness units are paralysed by lack of flexi-bility from their internal IT resource. This hosted method enables companies to rapidly take on new technologies, with minimal up-front expenditure.
Our training courses continue to be greeted with great praise. The courses are designed for under-writers, to help them to understand how to use Tele-interview data, and when and when not to acquire further medical evidence, in addition to the Tele-interview data.
Companies who have undertaken the training quickly reduce the amount of medical information they require, maximising the benefit of the Tele-interview data.
Jill Harvey and Emma Jones undertake the train-ing.
The course is undertaken in workshop style so that underwriters get hands on experience in us-ing Tele-interview data.
The course is suitable for underwriters from life offices and reinsurers.
Training dates:
Dublin:-
26th February 2008
Bank of Ireland Life Gratton House Lower Baggot Street Dublin 2
Ireland
To register:
To attend an open course please email: [email protected]
“How to use Tele-interview data”
Training courses for underwriters
The training covers:
The Tele-interview – the approach, the process, the sentinel effect, the recording and the report
How to get confident using Tele-interview information, with guidance on when fur-ther medical evidence may/may not be nec-essary
The typical Tele-interview questions and what they bring out
How to interpret the new style of disclosure e.g.
Cervical smear abnormalities
Breast lumps, moles, growths and other lumps
Recent symptoms
Drug use
Anxiety, stress and depression
Drinking patterns
Backs/joints/sports injuries
Neurological symptoms
Quality case study session –real cases re-viewed in study groups
Detailed feedback and discussion on case study work
At the end of the day delegates are able to use Tele-interview data more effectively and with increased con-fidence.
Fees:
The fee for attending the open course is £600 (€800) per delegate. MorganAsh customers enjoy a 50% dis-count.
Numbers for the open course are limited to 12 per course to allow for a high level of interaction and feed-back.
Fees for individual company courses are available on request.
“MorganAsh training was so good, I repeated it in-house for all our underwriters. In particular I liked the format of the training and the interaction with the case studies.”
Niamh Dillon
Deputy Chief Underwriter
Canada Life Assurance Europe Limited
“The MorganAsh Tele-underwriting course is excellent”
Gemma Wheeler
Page 10 MorganAsh News
Friends Provident (FP), has linked up with Mor-ganAsh to provide a Tele-interviewing service to speed up income protection applications and re-duce non-disclosure.
FP is a leading provider of Income Protection in the UK and primarily sells through the IFA chan-nel.
MorganAsh qualified and experienced nurses un-dertake the interviews, at a time and place to suit the consumer.
FP has adopted a “small t” approach at this stage and have changed their medical limits, reducing the reliance on GPRs. After extensive piloting with MorganAsh over the last two years, FP proved that nurse tele-interviews do provide suffi-cient information to enable underwriting without GPRs for many situations.
Further, FP also showed where a Tele-Interview is better value than nothing at all. Indeed, FP redesigned their evidence structure completely. Notably FP uncovered the justification for vary-ing by occupation class.
FP results showed that material non-disclosure did vary with age, increasing from 25% to 33%. However, more significant was the variation in material non-disclosure with occupation class, ranging from 20% to 35%. This is consistent with other companies where the variation with age is small.
As a result of the evidence and the analysis, FP have radically changed their medical limits, after agreement with their reinsurer Swiss Re, and now differentiate the collection of further medical evidence based on the occupation class of the ap-plicant.
Old Medical limits
New Medical limits
(benefit levels are expressed in £ per week)
The impact is that evidence is actually required on more cases overall, although GPRs will be required in fewer cases. The increase will improve disclosure as some cases which would have required no further evi-dence will now have a Tele-interview.
At present FP use Tele-interviewing just for small t discretionary interviewing. They are interested in ex-tending to Big T in due course.
Age GPR GPR + NSE GPR +ME Up to 40 350 550 1500 41-45 300 450 750 46-50 200 350 750 51+ 100 200 750 Age Tele-Interview GPR + NSE GPR +ME Occ1&2 Occ3&4 Up to 40 600 250 800 1500 41-45 400 200 600 750 46-50 300 100 400 750 51+ 200 100 300 750
Material Non-disclosure rate by occupation class 0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40% 1 2 3 4
Old and Ne w proportions of e vide nce colle ction 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100% Old Tele-Interview GPR & ME GPR & NSE GPR Int er v iew No ev idence
Case study
Friends Provident
its core activity of advising cus-tomers, .
MorganAsh use customer service representatives to undertake the interviews using existing Life com-panies point of sale systems.
All interviews are re-corded, but, due to the limitation of the point of sale systems, and the experience of the inter-viewer, there is little opportunity to drill down for depth in-formation, and hence little capability to re-duce GPRs and further medical evidence.
For those using MorganAsh Tele-Interviewing the number of re-turned reports with material changes is minimal. Hence the extra step of checking is not re-quired saving significant time and cost.
However, it still takes some days for the return of the report. To reduce this MorganAsh are intro-ducing an electronic approval and signature service.
At the end of the interview, the interviewer will obtain the e-mail address of the applicant, and then e-mail them inviting them to click onto a secure site to review their interview report.
Once the applicant has reviewed their report they can electronically approve the application, or email advising of changes required. Once amended the process will be repeated.
This has many
advantages:- With no posting of reports, ap-proved reports can be obtained in hours, saving valuable time and printing and posting costs.
Customer friendly and flexible (The option to print and post hard copies of the report will re-main).
The applicant confirms they have received the report (this is not the case when a report is posted to the applicant for approval and goes on cover automatically).
An electronic version of the final approved report is stored, negat-ing the need to scan in returned reports with hand written amendments.
MorganAsh are working on this with RGA technology partners and aim to roll this out in Q3 2008.
Reducing the total turn round time
Electronic approval & signatures
LifeSearch has contractedMorga-nAsh to undertake Tele-Data cap-ture on their customers as part of their drive to improve service. LifeSearch have commissioned the interviews at their cost to provide a thorough
inde-pendent and re-corded interview of the medical part of the appli-cation process, as well as speeding up the process. LifeSearch al-ready run a Tele-data capture ser-vice in-house.
MorganAsh now run a second team, thus giving LifeSearch increased capacity and flexibil-ity. With a rapid expansion of the interviewing service, this is enabling LifeSearch to focus on
One of the slower parts of the new business process is getting the ap-proval from the applicant.
Most people agree that the inter-view report should be sent to the applicant for their review. There are differences between companies on whether the report should be signed by the applicant. Even without a signature, the re-port is printed and posted to the applicant who is invited to review the documents and return it. For those companies not using MorganAsh Tele-interviewing the amount of reports that are re-turned is typically reported as 20%-40% with significant material disclosures. This adds another time consuming step to the process while the underwriters check each returned application prior to going on cover.
Tele-Data Capture for LifeSearch
Benefits Tele-Data
Capture Nurse Tele-Interviews
Reduce incomplete application forms
Reduce non-disclosure
Reduce Dr reports, Med evidence
Remove medical questions from advisor
Improved reinsurance rates
Page 12 MorganAsh News
Our last seminar in Gatwick UK was a great suc-cess with over 80 attendees. This session focused on the case studies of several companies, and the benefits they have found.
Sean McCarthy from National Farmers Union Mutual started the day focusing on the communi-cation and role out of their implementation. A case study on NFUM is enclosed within.
Debbie Akers from Friends Provident described in great detail the analysis they have undertaken to change their medical limits, and again a précis of this is enclosed within this Newsletter.
Jon Parker from Norwich Union Health Care re-vealed their impressive statistics on reducing GPRs and complete lack of any contentious claims.
David Jones from Dentist Provident rounded off the day with an amusing presentation of their highly successful Big T roll out.
Mark Friedel from RGA Technology Partners gave a brief overview of the AURA suite and Ian Sharpe and Emma Jones from MorganAsh dis-cussed the issues surrounding migrating to full Tele-Underwriting from Tele-Interviewing. Jill Harvey and Duncan Heald from SCOR Global Life detailed the Tele-Claims service, and Jill gave further details of the non-disclosure on Tele-Interviews collated from several customers. Once again Calvin Cole from RGA and Pete Dye from Swiss Re were kind enough to chair the vari-ous sessions.
Our next seminar dates are below.
Seminar dates:
Dublin, Ireland:
27
thFeb 08
Edinburgh, UK:
Q3 2008
SCOR Global Life
Tele-Interview Seminar
Köln, Germany:
11
thMarch 08
Seminars - Dublin, Cologne & Edinburgh
Dublin Agenda:
Case study – Using Tele-interviewing in the Group IP market: Martin Duffy - Irish Life Assurance
Case study – Replacing medical evidence: Noel Finnegan - Bank of Ireland
Reducing your reinsurance premiums with
Tele-Claims: Steve Maybury - SCOR Global Life
Analysing the data: Jill Harvey & Emma Jones MorganAsh
The non disclosure issue: Jill Harvey Mor-ganAsh
Moving from interviewing to Tele-underwriting: Emma Jones & Ian Sharpe
Update on MorganAsh: Andrew Gething
MorganAsh
Register:
To register for these events please email: [email protected]
Cost:
We completed 22,840 full nurse Tele-Interviews in 2007, a considerable increase on previous years. The following report is for all companies for the 2007 year.
Customer service
We received a total of 13 complaints, and hence an average of 1/1760 or 0.06%. There was no increase or decrease throughout the year and no real pattern between companies. The table lists the few complaints made.
Improvements have been made on the in-formation given at the point of sale, pre-paring the applicant and in the expected interview duration.
Turn round times
The total turn round times varied between companies, and distribution channels, the quickest monthly average being 5 days and the slowest up to 13 days. This does include some companies for which we wait 2 days while
letters are sent to applicants informing them of the interview. Hence, these fig-ures indicate a worse performance by MorganAsh than actual.
Turn round is one area we can improve on and we expect to do so in 2008. Good scene setting and plenty of contact num-bers assist in this process, as well as MorganAsh matching resources to vol-umes. We ask all customers to try and forecast their volumes for 2008, so we have the best chance to match our re-sources.
Claims
We have completed over 30,000 interviews to-date and still have zero contested claims. We are aware that some of our customers have paid out on valid claims, and have declined some fraudulent claims, that were interviewed by us. But to-date there have been no contested claims, due to ambi-guity on information collected, at the application stage on a Morga-nAsh Tele-Interview.
Report on 2007 Tele-Interviewing
Actual Turn round tim es - 2007
0.00 2.00 4.00 6.00 8.00 10.00 12.00 14.00 16.00
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
D
a
y
s
Actual mean time from receipt to interview complete Actual mean total turn round time
Nature of complaint No
Delay or confusion in contacting client due to mismanagement of information at the point of sale, phone problems
5
Delay in sending back the report – turned out that it was sent on a Friday – but only received in the life office on Monday
1
Misunderstanding / mishearing of a condition 1 Applicant thought the questions were to private and
invasive and/or the interview was too long 5 Applicant felt they were chased and pestered to
arrange the interview 1 Total complaints in 2007 13
Rate 1/1757
Actual % com ple te d in 10 days
0.0% 10.0% 20.0% 30.0% 40.0% 50.0% 60.0% 70.0% 80.0% 90.0% 100.0%
Jan Feb Mar A pr May Jun Jul A ug Sep Oct Nov Dec A ctual Total turn round w ithin 10 days Target turn round in 10 days
Page 14 MorganAsh News
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Contact MorganAsh
+44 (0) 870 143 6869 - UK Head office+49 (0) 800 1013199 - Köln, Germany
Hank George’s
Tele-underwriting essays
Hank George, co-author of the only book on underwriting, has written a series of 12 essays on all aspects of tele-underwriting. They can all be downloaded free of charge atwww.hankgeorgeinc.comand Hank may be reached at [email protected]
4
th
annual SOA Tele-underwriting seminar
Hank George and Andrew Gething will both be speaking at the 4th annual Society Of Actuaries Tele-underwriting seminar at Tampa Florida USA. 21-22 February 2008
Quality
We undertook a total of 894 full audits (i.e. listening and scoring the interviews) in 2007 with a mean score of 95.65%, above our target of 95%.
This represents a total of 4% au-dits of all cases. This includes the results for both targeted and ran-dom audits. Targeted audits are those selected on
Tele-Interviewers during training, when errors are expected. Argua-bly we should only report on ran-dom audits which is more repre-sentative.
Report on 2007 Tele-Interviewing
(Continued)
Actual Audit score 2007
90.00% 91.00% 92.00% 93.00% 94.00% 95.00% 96.00% 97.00% 98.00% 99.00% 100.00%
Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec Actual Mean QA score
