LIMRA, an industry organization has presented an Individual Life Insurance Sales report of US which claims that the overall individual life insurance premium had increased by 5% till September 2011 and 6% in the third quarter. This was largely due to strong WL or whole life insurance sales. Senior research analyst of LIMRA, Ashley Durham remarked that, “The biggest driver of individual life insurance growth in the third quarter was WL, whose premium increased 10 percent both for the quarter and year-to-date.”
It is expected that WL will benefit from the cash-value and premium guarantees as well as lifetime coverage, which are the main apprehensions for the policy buyers. In fact these concerns become bigger especially during the times of economic insecurities. This is one of the only life insurance products to show an affirmative growth in all the last five years. Almost 75% of the dealers have been able to improve sales and almost half of them got a double-digit increase in the year 2011, till now.
Mutual companies which actually represent about 25 percent of the WL sales reported that over 50 percent new whole life premium is the reason for half of the year-to-date total dollar growth. On the other hand this achievement is not only restricted to mutual corporations but it was also possible for the stock companies to augment the sales by almost 11 percent. The fraternal businesses which represent only around 5 percent of overall sales were able to increase their whole life sales by almost 25 percent.
To take the report further about 9% more WL premiums were sold by affiliated agents in the initial nine months of the year 2011, which represents seventy-five percent of the WL premiums. Autonomous producers were also able to make better profits by selling 18 percent additional WL premium. Seven percent extra WL premiums were traded with the help of direct marketing strategies. There are other routes like the worksite and banks which showed a double-digit growth. They are a very tiny part of the premium sales every year.
There is a growth in the whole life policy and has gone up by five percent for this quarter and 6% year-to-date. It is not surprisingly to see younger people showing interest in buying life insurance policies via the Internet. From the main age-group, 25-44, for buying life insurance policies, 31 percent felt that they liked to purchase it directly while three in every four considered the web to be the preferred way of buying life insurance policies.
