A Challenge to My Industry: Stop treating the consumer as an adversary

Ok, I just crossed the tipping point. I've seen one too many posts, articles and solutions about uncovering "lying smokers" or "uncovering fraud" within your life insurance applicants. Enough already! So to everyone out there who provides services or solutions to life insurance companies ... here's my challenge ... stop thinking of the consumer as an adversary.

This world view is rooted in scarcity thinking and the idea that we are playing a zero-sum game. At the heart of it is a belief that if the applicant wins, the insurer loses. We spend countless dollars and brain cells coming-up with finding ways to play "gotcha" with applicants who we assume are playing "gotcha" with us. But at what cost? If you just answered that question with the mortality cost of mis-representation then you are a part of the problem, not the solution. The actual cost is that consumers don't trust us or our industry. The actual cost is that we are not engaging enough consumers, not meeting enough needs and not shrinking the protection gap.

We freak out about information asymmetry in underwriting, but instead of creating a transparent process that invokes trust and creates symmetry we keep the process opaque and work to cancel-out information asymmetry with information asymmetry in some self-destructive race to the bottom. We can do better.

Oh, and before you utter the words "contestability period," I'd like to nominate those words for the "excuses hall of fame" right along with "regulation," and "legacy systems" for reasons why our industry can't innovate.

So let's embrace abundance thinking and realize that we are not playing a zero-sum game. Instead, we are providing a valuable product with a noble purpose. The consumer is not our adversary - they are our constituents, the group we are here to serve. Let's engender trust by offering trust. Let's price in a way that absorbs the nominal cost of mis-representation so we can offer a better experience and a more transparent process. The payoff could be overall market growth which means profits for insurers and much needed coverage for millions of people who need it.

Are you up for the challenge?