Applied Underwriters Partners with Health Outlook to Introduce Album Life Assurance

Applied Underwriters Chairman Steve Menzies today announced the formation of Album Life Assurance. The new Company is the result of a partnership between Applied Underwriters and Health Outlook, a health prediction company. The mission of Album Life Assurance is to find innovative ways to use life science and biotechnology to enhance valuable, personalized life insurance and related products that will help families manage some of the uncertainties of life. The Company plans to offer term life insurance, long-term care insurance and catastrophic health insurance. Initially, term life insurance will be offered in key US markets, and term life and catastrophic health insurance will be offered in select foreign jurisdictions.

Mr. Menzies observed that the life insurance market has functioned for decades largely unchanged, but is now rapidly transitioning to an online-centric model: “There is a massive amount of momentum in the life insurance industry towards underwriting through the analysis of big data. This is an effort to cut costs and enable rapid, online underwriting and sales. But we believe there are some difficult tradeoffs coming for our competitors, namely, underwriting loss costs will almost certainly rise, and customer trust and satisfaction will almost certainly suffer.”

Mr. Menzies continued: “Insofar as our competitors’ new methods might be convenient, people in general are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with intrusions into their personal data and lives. Especially when they are personally the subject of the decision being made, they don’t trust big data presumptions that work in ways no one really understands.”

Mr. Menzies concluded, “At Album, we’ll utilize traditional life underwriting methods, but significantly enhanced by the application of ongoing scientific discoveries. Health Outlook will handle developing the biotechnology applications; Applied will handle developing the related statistical research and data analytics. The resultant products will be innovative and have the potential to be very beneficial to our policyholders.”

Health Outlook Chief Executive Officer Howard Sams called the opportunity to apply its company’s knowledge and findings in the practical public benefit setting of insurance a great use of its research: “We at Health Outlook have lofty aspirations for ourselves with a vision for Album Life Assurance: if we were able to better predict disease and mortality, then there could be more opportunities for early intervention than are available today, and, life expectancy and human quality of life could be meaningfully enhanced.”