The Disability Insurance Opportunity

What You Need to Know

Roughly one-quarter of today’s 20-year-olds could need disability benefits at some point.
About 54% of Americans have life insurance.
Only 14% have private disability insurance.

According to the Social Security Administration, 1 in 4 of today’s 20-year-olds will become disabled during their career.

Statistically-speaking, people are more likely to become disabled than they are to die before retirement.

Nonetheless, just 14% of Americans own disability insurance compared to the 54% that own life insurance.

Disability insurance: Useful, yet undersold.

It’s an untapped opportunity for insurance agents and brokers.

Here are several more reasons why you should consider adding disability insurance to your product arsenal.

1. Technology

The underwriting and application process for disability insurance had always been a disaster.

It’s one of the main reasons income protection has remained untapped.

Not many products had a more dire need than disability insurance to be swept up by the insurtech wave.

With so many unique occupational factors to consider in the underwriting process, applying for disability insurance was terribly clunky and usually took months. This is especially true for 1099s and freelancers, who have a more difficult time predicting their regular income.

Disability insurance was simply not worth the time so both consumers and agents stayed away.

But insurtechs and their use of predictive analytics to expedite and digitize underwriting no longer makes a clunky process a valid excuse.

Technology has finally caught up to disability insurance. Insurtechs like Breeze have reduced quoting to seconds and applying to minutes.

It’s also available entirely online.

In addition to having a D2C side of the business, most of these turnkey insurtech platforms are primarily designed to be used by agents and brokers who want to efficiently scale a new product vertical and manage it all in one place.

Finally modernized for today’s consumer, there’s no better time for insurance professionals to start selling disability insurance.

2. The Chance to Cross-Sell

Disability insurance represents one of the more sensible cross-selling opportunities for agents and brokers.

There’s long-term disability insurance and short-term disability insurance, but the two can go hand-in-hand for the right consumer.

Long-term coverage often carries a waiting period of around 90 days, which can be too long for some folks who need a regular flow of paychecks to keep up with life’s expenses.