Face value

How a selfie could affect your life insurance

Several life insurance companies are testing technology developed by a Wilmington, North Carolina company that uses facial analytics and other data to estimate life expectancy.

Insurers use life expectancy estimates to make policy approval and pricing decisions. Lapetus Solutions says its product, Chronos, would enable a customer to buy life insurance online in as little as 10 minutes without taking a life insurance medical exam.

Is it all over my face? 1

If Chronos is adopted by an insurer, which would require regulatory approval from states, here’s generally how it would work.

You’d upload a selfie to the insurer online and answer health and other questions. The facial analytics technology would scan hundreds of points on your face and extract certain information, including your body mass index, physiological age (in layman’s terms, how old you look) and whether you’re aging faster or slower than your actual age.

The insurer would combine the results with your application answers and, if it chooses, any other information it typically pulls. If approved for coverage, you could buy a policy immediately online.

Lapetus co-founder Karl Ricanek worked on facial recognition technology for the FBI’s Biometric Center of Excellence and is a computer science professor at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. He started Lapetus with S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

2 Shortening the wait

Insurers are in a tough spot because consumers are used to buying products instantly. But it can take a month or longer to approve coverage if the insurer requires a medical exam.

And fewer people are buying. In 2016, an estimated 9.4 million individual policies were sold, down from 17.7 million individual policies in 1984, according to life insurance trade group LIMRA.

3 Photo ops

Amy Bach, executive director of consumer advocacy group United Policyholders, says such technology could be good for consumers if it makes the application process easier.

But she says she is concerned that insurers may rely too heavily on new technology and find later that their risk projections were off.

Lapetus is also developing a feature that it says will be able to tell whether someone ever smoked. Among the clues are early signs of crow’s feet around the eyes and under-eye bagging.

“Smoking is going to be written on your face,” Ricanek says. “Even if you stopped smoking, once it’s written, it’s there.”