At DIA Amsterdam 2022 Swiss Re’s Anita Munford, Head Magnum EMEA and Jason Stone, Magnum Sales & Client Relationship Manager, were on stage to talk about Swiss Re and its automated underwriting solution Magnum. In this editorial, we share the highlights of their presentation, their view of the market and explain why and how their solution can supercharge an insurer’s growth.  

Why was Magnum developed in the first place?  

For many consumers, buying life insurance is a painful experience. Magnum was initially developed over 30 years ago and has continuously evolved to transform the life insurance purchase customer journey, making it simpler and more accessible. Consumers now expect speed, agility and personalisation throughout any buying process, also when buying life insurance. With direct sales being the fastest growing sales channel, it means that life insurers need to invest in their digital transformation to leverage this opportunity and bring automation to the point of sale to address the challenges of lengthy and largely manual underwriting processes.  

As a reinsurer, Swiss Re is a risk knowledge company with solutions to help its clients, traditionally insurers but increasingly technology and solution partners, expand and enhance their business across the insurance value chain.  

What is Magnum in a nutshell?  

Magnum is an automated underwriting platform, developed to transform life insurance underwriting. It supports a range of distribution channels including online direct-to-consumer. Magnum is a modular SaaS solution that makes buying life insurance easier and faster through a better customer experience. As a result, life insurance becomes easily accessible, and insurers can grow their business without additional resource requirements. 

Magnum enables insurers to simplify and streamline the complexities of underwriting by automating the risk assessment process. With decisions powered by Life Guide, Swiss Re’s leading underwriting guide, Magnum enables faster application processing, improved customer experience, lower operating costs and better reporting and insight into the business that is being written. 

The solution comes with advanced analytics capabilities so that insurers can optimize their portfolio and continuously improve customer journeys. Because it is offered as a SaaS solution, the implementation time can be measured in a matter of weeks, not months. Magnum allows for tailored customer journeys according to the insurer’s specific needs and application forms, being flexible to be adjusted according to the product, the sum assured or any of the other variables needed for underwriting.  

Using Magnum, insurers can sell across a variety of sales networks and partners. Implementation is straightforward and integration is seamless so end customers will not realise they moved from one system to another. The Magnum interface supports responsive web design and allows insurers to reach customers anytime, anywhere and on any device.  

Sounds like a total solution, what would you say is the core?  

Magnum is a data-driven underwriting solution with a clear objective to make a decision at the point of sale for a majority of cases in minutes instead of weeks or months. Its goal is to maximize the percentage of policy applications issued immediately at the point of sale without any human interaction.  

In addition, the Magnum Analytics module offers detailed insights into the insurer’s underwriting performance, for instance, through effectiveness reports showing the straight-through-process (STP) rate, or number of cases where a decision is made at the point of sale, across the entire underwriting portfolio. Using Magnum, some clients realise more than 80-90% STP with Magnum. The near real-time analytics platform enables insurers to respond quickly to any market trends and movements in their portfolio and manage their risk appetite or mitigate the impact of any event, such as the Covid pandemic. Magnum Analytics also provides customer journey optimisation reports identifying, for example, roadblocks to finalise an application and time spent by the applicant on particular forms and questions.  

And lastly, Magnum is equipped with an exceptionally user-friendly Control Centre, a low code underwriting rule editor that allows for underwriting philosophy adjustments to the rules and underwriting risk assessments. Magnum also offers intelligent filtering to identify opportunities for improvement.  

How well does it fit daily operations where quick turn-around times can be expected? 

Should an opportunity for rule improvement be identified in Magnum Analytics it is relatively easy and fast to make changes in Control Centre, a cloud-based multi-user collaborative tool accessible from modern web browsers. Once the change, such as a rule edit, has been made, it’s extensively tested – Magnum is equipped with over half a million individual test cases. The rule base administrator can then export the rule base which is ready to be uploaded to a Magnum production server with zero downtime required. The next customer application will be underwritten with the new rule base changes.