MMSD Life Underwriting: 2023 Year in Review & 2024 Deliverables

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After my first three months leading the MMSD Life Underwriting team, I wanted to take a moment to share some of the great things I discovered and discuss our future direction. The MMSD Underwriting Team displays the best teamwork, culture, and customer focus I’ve seen in my career. They are laser-focused on providing industry-best service and are passionate about their profession.

2023 Year in Review 
All in all, 2023 was a solid year for us and here were some of our biggest accomplishments:

  • In year two of operation and still ramping up, we added 16 new underwriters to our staff, along with yours truly.  That’s over a 50% increase in staff requiring onboarding, training, and mentoring.
  • We created a new life underwriting structure that includes three leaders over distributor-focused production underwriting teams and a Large Case Unit.
  • We created several new marketing pieces, including our Underwriting Sweet Spots, Platinum Pass Program for Term and Permanent Policies, Juvenile Underwriting, Financial Underwriting and various impairment case clinics.
  • We placed the largest death benefit case in MassMutual’s history, a record $154 million death benefit.

2024 Deliverables
With 2023 well behind us, here’s what we’re focused on for this year:

  • Best offer the first time around! We will be more diligent in going out with our best offer from the start, so our distributor partners don’t have to come back to us for revisions.
  • Improving our use of third-party data to reduce traditional underwriting requirements. This will streamline the process for everyone.
  • Improving our underwriting service levels and placement rates. We’re determined to cut time off our review of quick quotes, informal inquiries, and formal applications. We will achieve this by increasing underwriters with authority limits and reducing additional requirement requests.
  • Delivering an Underwriting Playbook to improve the transparency of our risk selection and underwriting process. 
  • Partnering with our Disability Insurance Underwriting team for best practice sharing between organizations.
  • Improving the accelerated underwriting process. 
  • Participating in the application redesign project. 
  • Participating on the project that will replace outdated underwriting systems. 
  • Assisting with hitting our 2024 sales plan.

We want to build on the momentum created in 2023 and continue to increase our underwriting efficiency throughout 2024 to bring the best service and experience to you.

We greatly appreciate your feedback, partnership, and business! 

Dave Kanney
MMSD Chief Underwriter, Life Insurance