MMSD DI Underwriting: 2023 Year in Review & 2024 Deliverables

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After a year of strong DI performance and profound optimism to continue supporting DI product growth in 2024, I want to share a recap of 2023 achievements and plans we have for this coming year. While I believe you’ve seen the strong customer focus of our passionate and dedicated underwriters and case managers, we still have opportunities to further improve and refine our processes, workflows and system integration. I remain committed to providing our team with the tools, guidelines, and support needed to earn your business.

2023 Year in Review
Last year was a strong year, with some of our biggest accomplishments:

  • In our second year of operation, we have built on the training foundation of Underwriters and Case Managers. We have trained an additional Underwriting Relationship Consultant (URC) and hired an additional Case Manager.
  • Improved our issue and participation limits.
  • Elimination of net worth guideline and enhanced our unearned income underwriting.
  • Implemented several internal system enhancements to assist with case identification and internal processing accuracy.
  • Revised our exclusive group discount offerings and created a consolidated Group Number for medical and specialty dental residents.
  • Enhanced our Express DI Underwriting Program to reduce age/amount requirements and streamline the underwriting process.
  • Implemented new automated underwriting capabilities to assess medical risk profiles and improve underwriter speed and efficiency to decisions. 

2024 Deliverables
After a strong 2023, we quickly pivoted our focus to our 2024 efforts:

  • Best offer the first time! We will continue to diligently make our best offer first and offering reconsiderations windows so our distributor partners don’t have to come back to us for revisions.
  • Improving placement rates. This comes with our efforts to make the best offer first, continued underwriter trainings, increasing underwriter authority (8 underwriters increased already in 2024) and quick quote turnaround times.
  • We continue to review exclusive Discount Groups and have opened ~50% to the consolidated Group for medical. 
  • This spring, we are implementing a new Account Manager Operation model and expect all distributors to have access to their dedicated Account Manager by the fourth quarter, 2024. Our investment in this critical role will better align us with industry standards and position us to earn more of your business.
  • In the first quarter, we implemented three underwriting guidelines enhancements for Business Owners, Executives and 1099 contractors.
  • We will continue to explore additional underwriting and medical guideline enhancements throughout 2024, ensuring we are competitive in the spaces we want to grow.
  • Improving our in-force policy increases/additions. We are actively engaged with internal business partners to identify root causes to process gaps and are committed to making both easy “Just-Do-It” enhancements and longer-term investments to improve that experience.
  • Continue our thought leadership on the application redesign project.
  • Partnering with our Life Insurance Underwriting team for best practice sharing between organizations.

We are excited about 2024 and building on our 2023 momentum. As you can see, we have a strong focus on the competitiveness of our guidelines and the ease of our distributors doing business with us.