ANZ Wealth subsidiary, OnePath, has launched a medical pre-assessment ‘wizard’ for its insurance division – an online tool to assist advisers in identifying loadings and policy exclusions in real-time.
Hailed an “industry first” by ANZ, the pre-assessment wizard reduces the days’ long manual process to just a few minutes, providing an online decision-making engine for advisers to qualify prospective policy holders in real-time.
Speaking with FST Media, Gerard Kerr, Head of Life Insurance at ANZ Wealth, said the increased speed of pre-assessment turnaround offers a significant advantage to their advisers.
“It’s minutes, rather than days, which really helps our advisers and clients shape where they go next,” Kerr said.
The wizard delivers a marked improvement over the traditionally paper-based pre-assessment process, which, Kerr admitted, “hasn’t been the quickest”.
“The tool’s real-time functionality sets it apart from other pre-assessment tools in the market, which are often just online forms that still require an underwriting team to manually process,” Kerr said in a recent release.
“When using the OneCare Pre-Assessment Wizard, advisers only need to ask their clients a few medical questions to receive an immediate indicative assessment,” he added.
Developed in-house by ANZ, the wizard runs off a proprietary rules-based engine, which can make an indicative assessment of prospective clients based on only a few qualifying questions.
“Even in cases where information is unavailable, the wizard can still assume a best case scenario to provide an indicative result on-the-spot,” Kerr said.
Feedback from the first stage of the rollout has been overwhelmingly positive, according to Kerr.
“Advisers who’ve trialled the tool said its ability to provide an immediate underwriting decision was having a real impact on client satisfaction and conversation rates,” he said.
While there are currently no plans to roll the system out beyond medical pre-assessment, Kerr does see the utility in expanding the service.
“We certainly see opportunities to evolve this moving forward, perhaps figuring modifying the ‘smarts’ [engine] for queries based on financial or occupation classifications. But for now, [the wizard is] for medical pre-assessment.”
