Optimizing Life insurance product development

Part 1: Introduction

Over the last year, we at RGA have made a concerted effort to quantify,analyse and better understand the life insurance product development efforts of our clients, the world's leading life insurers.

Part of those efforts manifest themselves via richer insight sharing conversations with clients, another part is via formal sharing of PD related best practices globally between RGA colleagues, and another effort has been to quantitatively survey numerous companies around the world.

To that end, RGA conducted its first global survey of life insurers in the middle of 2014. We received over responses from over 100 product development leaders in 12 countries in Europe, Asia and the Americas.

Broadly speaking Life Insurance Product Development suffers from two major issues:

• Long lead times to generate and bring new ideas to consumers
• Low levels of innovation in product ideas

Over the course of four LinkedIn articles, I'll share a synthesis from our report, along the following topics:

1. Introduction
2. Root causes of slow PD times
3. Innovation and information sources in PD
4. Path forward for PD leaders

As always, welcome and thoughts, perspectives, and comments.
The full report can be found here

Kind regards,
Farron