Award Applications

We as FNB are proud to present another innovation with our new Life Insurance offering, available on our market-leading digital channels
Life insurance in South Africa has become increasingly complex and inaccessible to the average South African. Underwritten life insurance products exist in a highly intermediated, extremely complex world of existing products, which are generally only more accessible to the those in the upper-mid to upper end of the socio-economic spectrum. As this is an almost entirely broker-driven market, products are artificially complex and designed to require the help of a financial advisor (who receives commission for selling the product). As a result, the problem become apparent – the lack of accessibility for the majority of the market for underwritten life insurance products.
Drawing on our extensive experience in innovation in transactional and personal banking, we have created a new, simpler platform for life insurance that offers products that are inclusive, easy to understand and offer incredible value. Most importantly, we’re asking “how can we help you?”
We have developed South Africa’s first end to end digital platform for taking up life insurance – with full digital underwriting – and the ability to manage your policies. This offering is available online and on FNB’s award winning and internationally recognized Banking App. This platform offers customers the ability to structure their own policy with bespoke cover amounts, escalations, terms and benefit linking, and can choose from Life Cover, Critical Illness Cover and Disability Cover (for both occupational disability and disability from looking after oneself).
Building the insurance platform of the future isn’t easy - we took a phased approach to our new, comprehensive set of life insurance platforms. Due to its deep integration with the bank’s core systems and data streams, the digital fulfilment portion was the most complex aspect. Beginning the design phase in 2015, it took less than 24 months to release to the public in March 2017. This platform makes use of innovative underwriting strategies in order to provide streamlined take-up while using existing bank data to ensure a deep understanding of each customer’s individual risk profile.
Along with the deep linking in to the bank’s architecture, these underwriting systems were the most significant challenge encountered in the development of the FNB’s new insurance platforms.
Predictive underwriting enables the use of customer data to enhance the underwriting experience. It allows the customer to be underwritten without the need for long medical questionnaires. The predictive model uses makes use of customer analytics and transactional spend history in order to create a compelling offering.
The model enables us to pre-select customers, as well as enhance their underwriting experience based on the improvement to mortality. This model is a first in the South African market that predicts mortality to improve the underwriting process.
FNB’s digital Life Insurance platform is experiencing increasing monthly volumes and customer engagement. Further functionality for this platform to include new benefits and improve underwriting using new predictive and recursive models that make even more sophisticated use of existing customer data to further streamline the underwriting process, create better customer models and offer more competitive, individualised pricing. These developments will be implemented in the 2018 calendar year.