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Life Insurance

Could a Selfie Save You Time and Money On Your Life Insurance Premiums?

23 Oct 2017

Life Insurance by Life Stage

The choices you make today can impact your long-term health, wealth and happiness. Understand the important role Life Insurance can play in key life events.

While selfies may be a great way of showing off those holiday snaps and making everyone else on your friend list jealous, there may actually be a far better use for them – one that could save you time and money in the long run.

Digital Disruption In Health

Technology is everywhere and it’s changing everything we do. So is the insurance industry next? Absolutely.

There is technology currently being developed that will allow people to submit their life insurance application digitally, then have it assessed and approved within a few minutes, all via our trusty smartphone. Quicker access to cover may be just a swipe, click or snap away.

How Does A Selfie Show Health?

Lapetus Life Event Solutions, based out of North Carolina in the US, is utilising the power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) (called Janus) to scan your photo and then assess how healthy you are based on visual cues it is designed to look for. For example, if it notices sun spots or wrinkles, it may determine excessive exposure to the sun, or even correlate skin tone to smoking habits. Of course, it is also designed to pick up cues indicating good health, which could in turn lead to lower Life Insurance premiums.

Using facial recognition software, Janus can estimate factors such as Body Mass Index (BMI) and biological aging of the person within the frame. The AI then takes all of these signals and runs it against algorithms based on medical statistics, which means that it is able to create an accurate picture of your overall health, simply with the information derived from your selfie. It’s just a small example that shows our health is written all over our faces.

What Does This Mean For Life Insurance?

If the accuracy and adaptability of this kind of technology can be perfected to deliver precise results, the obvious advantage lies in improved convenience for everyone involved. There may come a day where answering questionnaires or seeing your local doctor for a physical assessment only follows a selfie pre-assessment when applying for fully underwritten life insurance.

The beauty of the humble selfie is that it puts things on display with the tap of a button. This means that all of your healthy habits will get detected. Looking after your skin, controlling your weight and improving overall physical health will show up in the scan as much as someone’s bad habits – which could ultimately save you money on your premiums.

As fanciful as it seams, this technology may be here sooner than you’d expect. In fact, Janus is already being trialed by several insurance providers in the USA. At NobleOak, we always keep an eye out for tech disruptions that have the potential to improve our products and services and Janus is just one such innovation emerging within the InsureTech market. The world is ever-changing and we believe the opportunities to drive innovation and new customer experiences in life insurance are endless – selfies included.

Improving Health Could Reduce Your Premiums

It is always a good plan to make improvements to your health and wellbeing with positive lifestyle habits and, with new technology like the selfie scan on the horizon, it may be a great motivational excuse. Improving your health not only impacts your quality of life, it may also have an impact on your life insurance premiums. This means that you can get the insurance you and your family need, at the price you can afford.

In the market for Life Insurance? Speak to a NobleOak Specialist today on 1300 041 494, or read our FAQ page here for more information.

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