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In brief

• Life insurers are elevating and expanding their distribution strategies as they look to combat flatlined market growth and decreasing consumer interest in life products. 
• Insurers that support agents with advanced digital tools will attract new talent to the industry and increase agent relevance with a younger customer base.
• A single source of sophisticated, effective, AI-driven tech tools across distribution channels empowers agents and brokers to personalize client services and capitalize on up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.

Life insurers face a grim reality: Growth in mature markets has been flat for the past 16 years (-0.2%), with penetration declining from 5.4% in 2007 to 3.6% in 2023. Similarly, life insurance’s share of all consumers’ assets has .

The lack of organic growth paired with a difficult economic environment puts carriers in intense competition for every quote — and their priorities are shifting as a result. More insurers are invested in strengthening their distribution channels as they look to get ahead of the pack and capture more of the market share in 2025. And as 61% of life insurance agents struggle with lead conversion, insurers are focused on providing key distribution partners with the digital tools they need to succeed. Here’s what that practically looks like in 2025.

• 95% of insurers are committed to enhancing agents’ digital experiences to streamline business operations.
• 65% of insurers are invested in empowering agents to improve customer service.
• 44% of insurers are prioritizing intelligent agent and staff augmentation platforms to improve customer interactions and optimize workflow efficiencies.

For life insurance carriers, agents and brokers are also their customers; they seek the same level of advanced technology and user-friendly tools as those that have been developed and supplied to prospective clients and insureds. Supporting the agents supports insureds, too. Improving transparency and the ease of doing business for agents ultimately trickles down to provide better experiences for the consumer and operational efficiencies for the insurer.

In today’s precarious life insurance landscape, a carriers’ investment in their agents’ and brokers’ success — including building out digital efficiencies and tools — will allow them to continue to grow and thrive well beyond 2025.

Consumers are leading the charge to change

The modern consumer has unlimited access to a world of knowledge at their fingertips in 2025. Today’s consumers are more empowered and more likely to conduct their own online research to educate themselves about the life products available. For this reason, most prospective customers know a great deal about your product and that of your competitors long before their first agent interaction. 

These self-educated customers value transparency and expect a menu of options to be at their fingertips online. When it comes to policy pricing, for example, 59% of life insurance policyholders express dissatisfaction — but not with the actual cost of premiums. Instead, customers express frustration with the lack of visibility into premium calculations and the impact of their lifestyle choices on rates and hidden fees.

While modern consumers seek out digitally engaging resources to help guide their research and discovery, they also expect ready access to a physical agent who can provide personalized advisory services when they require additional support, guidance or information. Simply put, when it comes time to make their purchase, modern consumers want to have a swift conversation with an agent or partake in a straightforward online transaction.

Unfortunately, that isn’t the typical life insurance customer experience — yet. Instead, the reality is more often anchored in outdated technology and limited digital options that create hurdles for customers at multiple touch points in their life insurance buying journey, resulting in excessive paperwork, lengthy wait times and confusing communication.

As a result, customers find interactions with insurers less efficient, convenient and personalized than in other industries. Despite policyholder expectations for transparency and tailored experiences, only 28% of

Agents become more consultative to meet evolving consumer expectations

It’s not just the consumers that are changing their expectations. With over the next decade, there is also a major shift in agent pool demographics. As the agent and broker force enters retirement in record numbers, tech-savvy millennial and Gen Z talent are filling their shoes, and they prefer more digital and accessible ways of working.

Agents of yesterday spent a large portion of their time and efforts on manually running quotes and had little time left over to dedicate to advising their clients. Today’s agents, on the other hand, must assume a more trusted, consultative role. To be successful in today’s fast-paced landscape, agents need to be everywhere the client is and available when the client needs them, equipped with personalized details that help them to move purchases forward seamlessly and effectively.

Agents are now more reliant than ever on insurers to provide advanced digital capabilities that enable them to meet customers’ demands for contextual advisory, wherever they are in their purchase journey. Agents no longer have the experience or time to investigate how they can get clients to a point of purchase. They want and need all the information right at their fingertips — just like their customers do. 

Insurers that adopt a tech-forward approach to supporting agents with artificial intelligence (AI)-augmented distribution, integrated sales and marketing tools, faster quoting, data-driven customer insights, and single window dashboards and portals will help to attract new, younger talent into the life insurance industry while increasing relevance and engagement with a younger customer base.

Industry use case: Empowering agents to create interactive policy proposals

A partnered with a cloud-based insurance sales acceleration platform to provide agents with a new digital tool that instantly creates customized proposals.

A revolutionary digital tool is helping agents instantly deliver strong, personalized, convincing policy proposals to prospective clients. By leveraging client data, the tool illustrates how a life insurance policy can address issues such as inflation, taxation, market volatility and life expectancy within the context of the client’s unique circumstances, helping them to clearly see the direct, positive impact their life policy will have on them and their family. The tool generates an easy-to-understand proposal that’s both simple and clear for the agent to explain and the client to understand.

Equip agents with the right tools for successful sales and value-driven relationships

When agents lack access to a real-time, holistic view of customer data and must navigate disparate core systems for different lines of business (LOBs) and segments, they lose the ability to seamlessly and effectively sell, up-sell and cross-sell.

An agent who is equipped with the right digital tools and instantly accessible client data, though, can have personalized conversations about which life product best suits each customer at that moment. Have they had a recent life event? Are they approaching retirement or had a new member join the family? When an insured needs to update their life insurance policy and the agent has real-time insights into their circumstances, it’s possible to make tailored recommendations on an annuity, disability insurance or long-term care coverage to best meet their needs. New revenue opportunities suddenly become possible while simultaneously building loyalty between the client and agent as well as the agent and carrier.

The same AI technology that can be used to power self-service consumer portals can also drive distribution transformation and fuel intelligent platforms for agent and broker use as well. AI-enabled tools can analyze customer data to provide agents with intelligent, personalized, real-time recommendations on optimal coverage types and rates for each client they serve. AI-enhanced CRM systems that operate across all LOBs and segments can help track interactions, predict needs, automate tasks, minimize data entry and enable proactive outreach so agents can make informed decisions about where to focus their efforts while revealing up-selling and cross-selling opportunities.

A single digital toolbox for the benefit of every distribution channel  

Life insurers, captive agents and independent agents all benefit when everyone operates from a single digital toolbox, enabling the most optimal client experiences. Complexity and disconnect grow when captive agents are equipped with one set of tools while independent agents have another set, and ultimately, it’s the carrier’s bottom line that suffers.

In the context of today’s difficult life insurance landscape, carriers that broaden their reach to be everywhere their prospective clients are at the times they want, need and are ready to buy will set themselves up for success. And insurers that extend the same powerful tools and digital experiences to their independent agents as they provide to their captive agents position themselves and their distribution partners to win more business.

Life insurers aren’t just competing for a share of the target market; they’re also competing for the agents and brokers that are selling life products to that market. Insurers not only need to have the right products to position themselves favorably for independent agents, but they also need to provide the right digital tools to help personalize agents’ sales approach to their clients and prospects.

When insurers invest in a single source of tools for all agents, those tools provide every distribution channel with the best experience possible. Captive agents become more efficient, improve the carrier’s return on investment and grow the business. Independent agents that get to benefit from the use of these same tools enjoy the ease of doing business with the carrier, making that insurer more attractive for agents to want to partner with them again in the future.

It is important to provide all agents — regardless of whether they’re captive or independent — with an intelligent platform that gives them transparency into their clients’ purchase journeys, underwriting and claims statuses and their own commissions. This decreases friction, improves efficiency, boosts sales, promotes overall success and encourages loyalty to the insurer that is powering it all.

The importance of supplying advanced digital support and accessible customer insights becomes even more important for agents just entering the industry. Younger, tech-savvy talent is both attracted to and reliant on modern technology to help support their day-to-day workflow, and sophisticated distribution tools are critical to help position the next generation of life insurance agents for consultative selling and success.

To optimize your investment in innovative tech solutions, conduct comprehensive trainings for all agents and brokers on when and how to use the tools provided to them. Focus on promoting a culture of open-mindedness to foster effective change management with your distribution partners.

Industry use case: Streamlining application processes

A teamed up with a U.S.-based insurance marketing organization and a cloud-based software provider to offer agents faster, streamlined application processes for online term life underwriting.

Using predictive data modeling and cutting-edge technology, one European re-insurance carrier, an insurance marketing organization and a software provider joined forces to build out an advanced technology platform that both simplifies and speeds up the term life insurance application process for agents and their clients. Delivering underwriting decisions in a matter of seconds, this innovative platform is transforming operations and delivering convenient, user-friendly experiences that keep pace with modern clients’ evolving needs and expectations. This collaborative partnership is dismantling barriers to purchasing term life insurance coverage while enabling agents to provide differentiated service to their clients that sets them apart from the rest.

A roadmap to ease of doing business for agents and brokers

Life insurers that put modern digital capabilities in the hands of agents and brokers enhance customer satisfaction and fuel business growth.

But which tools will be most effective and drive the greatest success?

It’s best to start by examining the top agent and broker pain points, and then allow these issues to lead your solutions journey. Life insurance agents consistently say they need three things to grow their business:

• Sell more policies faster
• Increase market reach
• Provide clients with a best-in-class experience

When insurers holistically transform their technology from the back-end core system support to data and analytics to the front-end digital tools, they equip agents with a user-friendly experience and seamless access to vital components of the insurer’s ecosystem. This approach helps to solve for core agent needs and supports business growth. 

ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ can help with a customized distribution strategy that meets these three agent needs in a way that is optimized for your specific business, target market and agent workforce.