New HSBC Life Pre-Sales Underwriting Tool
At HSBC Life, our focus is on helping advisers to secure cover for their clients quickly and efficiently supported by our industry first enhanced digital underwriting journey.
Our new Pre-Sales Underwriting Tool is another important milestone in our ongoing evolution. Whilst not directly replicating our underwriting journey, the tool delivers indicative answers to advisers within just two minutes saving time going through the full underwriting process.
Other key benefits include:
- Answers common pre-application enquiries across multiple medical conditions
- Provides an instant, indicative underwriting decision with any applicable loadings
- Provides option to download the pre-sales decision as a report
- Covers HSBC Life Critical Illness, Life and Life & Critical Illness Plus products
- Ability to get an outcome on past or future travel
- Also, Family history, BMI, Sports & Pursuits and TPD
Our tool is intuitive and simple to use. Advisers just need to enter basic information such as date of birth, whether a client is a smoker or non-smoker and any family history. It does not ask for personal details and will quickly inform advisers and their clients of the likely outcome from the full underwriting process before they progress to full application stage.
This is our latest development to further streamline the application process for protection products at HSBC Life and to make it even more transparent.
In addition, the launch of the new tool will help ensure more people receive the important Life and Critical Illness cover they need which is the focus of our underwriting approach at HSBC Life.
Our Pre-Underwriting Guide provides information on the most commonly disclosed health conditions, and how they affect Life Protection and Critical Illness applications.
Enhanced digital underwriting
We launched Enhanced Digital Underwriting in 2022 and it has already transformed our service to advisers. Medical screening requests are sent to and received back automatically from our medical screening provider, Square Health.
Our digital underwriting rules engine then instantly provides an eligibility decision by automating medical screening requests and appointments.
By December 2022) our straight through acceptance rate increased to 75% for Life, from a starting position of 65% in January 2022, and 72% for Critical Illness, from a starting position of 57% in January 2022.
We have also successfully launched a ground-breaking service which digitises the medical screening process and negates the need for physical underwriting unless there is a duty of care for customers whose screening has identified an abnormality in their results.
This innovation has accelerated the turnaround time for a screening from as much as six weeks to between one and two weeks.
Saving advisers and clients’ time
The length of time it takes to make an application decision and underwriting in the protection market is a major reason for people dropping out. Our approach to underwriting is to keep it straightforward and offer uncomplicated protection products backed by a streamlined claims process.
HSBC Life – easy to do business with
The launch of our Pre-Sales Underwriting Tool is yet more evidence of our commitment to ensuring doing business with HSBC Life is seamless. Take a look at the tool and our explainer video to learn more. Your dedicated Business Development Manager will also be happy to help if you have any questions.
We hope this development will mean that more of your clients have essential access to the important cover they need which is the core focus of our underwriting approach at HSBC Life.