Fidelity Investment's Jill Maher sees life insurance as noble work

Jill Maher, head of term life insurance at Fidelity Investment Life Insurance Co. in Wellesley, Massachusetts, sees the business as noble work.

The 2023 Women in Insurance Leadership honoree explains: When she moved over to life insurance from her previous role with Fidelity's personal investing business, she spent time analyzing the claims that Fidelity's life insurance business had paid out to client beneficiaries. "When you're looking at data and you're looking at folks and hearing the stories behind those policies, and those folks are the same age as you or a little bit older than you and have families that they left behind, life insurance just feels like really noble, worthwhile work," she says.

Working in various parts of the Fidelity Investment business during her 10-year career there has helped inform her view of the company's clients and their problems that the company can solve, she says. The job is to "help make our clients aware of the important role that life insurance plays with a healthy financial plan, and then how do we make it as easy and seamless and streamlined for them to figure out and understand how much life insurance they need and then get themselves protected." A lot of what she learned in her four years working with Fidelity's digital advice business, Fidelity Go, has been applicable to the life insurance side, in making it simple and accessible for clients, she says.

Toward the goal of streamlining the customer experience, Maher and her team have been exploring new technologies that will allow Fidelity to offer "instant underwriting" for online life insurance applications, accelerating part of the underwriting process while keeping risk in check, she says. They've also integrated the online life insurance application process with Fidelity's other businesses, allowing clients with multiple Fidelity accounts to pre-fill the data on their applications, for example, or update their account information simply. 

Optimizing the life insurance application and policy management interface on the company's website has been a continual process working with technical architects, software developers, actuaries, underwriters, the company's user experience design team and compliance, she says.

"We need folks that are coming at the problems that we're trying to solve with diverse perspectives in order to build the experiences that we need," Maher says. "As it relates to our visual application, we need to present an experience that clients intuitively understand. We're trying to bring the best of technology solutions to the table to make that as easy and simple for them to do as lots of other digital experiences."

Bringing in many points of view helps to ensure that the customer's perspective is not lost, Maher says. "The insurance industry can have its own vernacular," she says. "Think about a replacement policy — the average person may not know what the definition of a replacement policy is. Our team has spent a lot of time thinking about how do we present an application at eye level — someone that's got a busy life may have work in a totally different part of the world, can answer questions and get through our application without needing to have a dictionary from the insurance industry as to what we mean about a certain term."

Looking ahead, Maher says she sees artificial intelligence tools as potentially helping to identify clients of the broader Fidelity organization who have a "protection gap" and need life insurance. AI could also help in educating clients and getting them over "hurdles of inertia" that can prevent them from buying life insurance, she says. 

"Part of our role is in educating them on why it's important to have proper protection in place and then making it easy for them to apply and get protected," Maher says. "Through AI, we see us being able to deliver a more personalized and targeted message that will really connect with our clients more powerfully."

For clients with policies in place, AI could play a role in anticipating their evolving needs — such as when a policy term is coming to an end or a significant life event is imminent — and in helping the policyholder figure out how to change their life insurance protection, she says.