The Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company, Horsham, is a 2022 Insurance Technology Impact Award Winner. It received the honor from Aite-Novarica Group Insurance Technology Research Council out of Boston.

The Impact Awards represent the largest purely peer-juried awards in the industry. Winners are selected for their real-world business impact and their demonstration of the effective use of technology to meet business goals.

Penn Mutual was recognized for the use of data and analytics in its accelerated life insurance underwriting.

“Streamlining underwriting and providing efficient, effective digital environments to support the sales process have been an ongoing priority area for life insurers, and the pandemic only heightened the importance of these capabilities,” said Harry Huberty, Head of CIO Research at Aite-Novarica Group.

“Penn Mutual’s success in leveraging automation to support these needs is an excellent example of the ways in which insurers can utilize technology to enable greater sales volumes and create better customer experiences.”

Tom Harris, president of life insurance and annuities for Penn Mutual, said: “This award is a testament to our team’s innovation and commitment to supporting our financial professionals with tools and technologies that allow them to better focus on providing solutions for their clients.”

Penn Mutual’s accelerated life insurance underwriting capability was introduced in 2017 as part of an industry-leading, end-to-end digital client experience. The initiative has seen the company develop machine learning-enabled predictive models to improve automation, simplifying and accelerating the life insurance application experience. These models have helped reduce average policy issue time by 50 percent (to as little as a few hours) and supported a 28 percent sales growth without increasing underwriting staff levels.