At present, AIA offers advisers an iPad-compatible app which allows them to monitor the progress of policy applications, but does not include an underwriting engine, while Fidelity’s Apollo software includes an underwriting capability, but is not available online.

However, both companies have told Good Returns they plan to launch straight-through processing online applications for advisers in the near future.

AIA head of distribution and marketing, Darrin Franks, said the company has created a new adviser work bench, the Adviser Insight Portal, which he described as “the most significant technology implementation we’ve embarked on in the 30 years we’ve been operating in New Zealand.”

He said the iPad-compatible portal allows advisers to see in real time how a policy application is progressing, what outstanding requirements may exist and how much business they’ve issued to date.

Franks said the portal doesn’t include an underwriting engine – yet.

“We’re very close to that stage. It certainly has some aspect of that [underwriting rules engine] because what it will do is on submission, it will tell people whether there’s likely to be outstanding requirements, however it doesn’t go to the nth degree,” he said.

“What will happen in due course is you could be sitting in front of a client, and if for example they were a clean-skin, our policy will get to the position that we can say your policy has been issued and you can expect it in the mail the next day.”

Fidelity Life chief executive Milton Jennings said the company’s Apollo software included an underwriting engine and, in what he claimed was a New Zealand first, said it is able to provide an adviser with a real time decision on all the company’s life products.

However, at present the software is Windows-based and only able to be used via laptop, though the company is working on a web-based version.

“There are other electronic apps in the market, but they don’t have an underwriting engine behind them,” Jennings said.

“This has a full underwriting engine with 82,000 rules in it so you load all your details and it will go through the rules set and give you a decision at the point of sale.”

Jennings said the move to make the Apollo application available online was driven by the now ubiquitous presence of smartphones and iPads, and he had a warning for the wider industry.

“The insurance industry has traditionally been quite backward in these sort of things. They’re going to have to start moving with the times or they’ll find a lot of the younger people will just go online and do it all themselves,” he said.

“We have to make sure we give the advisers the right tools so they’re efficient in the way they do business and that they can relate to the people they’re doing business with as well.”