Patent Issued for Systems And Methods For Assessing Protection Needs Of Retirement Services Clients And Determine Cross-Selling Potential Of Customers (USPTO 10,366,412)

2019 AUG 13 (NewsRx) -- By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Insurance Daily News -- A patent by the inventors Ross, Gareth (Amherst, MA); Walker, Tricia (East Hampton, MA), filed on December 19, 2014, was published online on August 12, 2019, according to news reporting originating from Alexandria, Virginia, by NewsRx correspondents.

Patent number 10,366,412 is assigned to Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company (Springfield, Massachusetts, United States).

The following quote was obtained by the news editors from the background information supplied by the inventors: “Different individuals have different financial goals for retirement. Individuals often prepare for retirement by first determining a desired retirement income and then preparing a plan to achieve the desired retirement income. Typically, desired retirement income can be anywhere between 40%-80%, or more, of the pre-retirement income for the life of the individual. Examples of retirement savings vehicles include annuities and life insurance products, among others.

“Annuities allow investors to place a certain amount of money in a tax-deferred account in exchange for income in the future. Individuals who need additional income sources during retirement can invest in annuities. An annuity can also be an attractive investment if the customer is looking for a retirement account without contribution limits. Additionally, unlike some retirement accounts, customers are not required to take a minimum distribution from annuities at retirement age.

“Life insurance provides a benefit to a policyholder’s beneficiaries when the insured dies. Life insurance is needed by individuals to pay for the majority of their family expenses should they die. Life insurance can provide a policyholders’ family the ability to pay for the policyholder’s funeral expenses and maintain the family’s standard of living. For example, a policyholder’s family can continue to make mortgage payments and pay household expenses using the proceeds from a life insurance policy death benefit.

“Planning for retirement is difficult due to the many seemingly conflicting goals and risks that a retiree faces. Retirees may have accumulated retirement savings well in excess of what is needed to provide for basic spending needs, but may be overly-cautious about spending it too quickly during the early years of retirement. This cautiousness might prevent them from fully enjoying traveling and other activities that are typically associated with the ‘golden years’ of life. Maximizing the benefit from a given set of retirement assets can be difficult, particularly while taking into account a given retiree’s tolerance for risk. Additionally, the traditional retirement planning approach often ignores retirement protection often focusing only on retirement funding.

“One conventional approach involves the implementation of different tools by insurance companies in order to assess the customer needs in terms of protection for retirement services. Some of those tools may be focused on the level of protection provided to a customer’s current financial state and typically addressed with life insurance. Interactive tools can be used for evaluating a customer’s potential financial situation during retirement and how life insurance might affect a customer’s financial situation. The evaluation of an individual’s insurance protection is based on whether the protection is commensurate with the individual’s current financial replacement value. However, the existing or conventional approaches and/or tools related to offer insurance protection based on customer needs are not effective or efficient enough.

“For the aforementioned reasons, there is a need for an improved system and method to provide the protection needs of retirement services and to determine the cross-selling product capability of current insurance customers.”

In addition to the background information obtained for this patent, NewsRx journalists also obtained the inventors’ summary information for this patent: “A system and method for assessing the protection needs for retirement services and providing cross-selling products are disclosed. According to some embodiments, the present disclosure includes a system architecture of a retirement protection system, which is used to assess the protection needs of a retirement service customer (at an individual, not a work-site level), and to develop strategies to cross-sell life products to those customers. More specifically, the retirement protection system analyzes a sample of RS (retirement service) customers stored in a database to determine propensity of clients for acquiring cross-selling products (e.g. of life, disability income, and annuity products).

“According to an embodiment, the system architecture includes different components that dynamically interact with each other through a network connection. The system architecture of the retirement protection system includes different components, such as a RS client data source, an internal database, an external database, a retirement service system, a marketing campaign module, an automated transaction platform, and an ongoing service module.

“According to another embodiment, the present disclosure refers to a method for assessing protection needs and determining cross-selling propensity of RS clients. The method describes a process with multiple steps, where a retirement service system through a software module obtains a sample of RS clients from the RS client data source. The retirement service system includes different tools or software modules to determine a correlation between customers’ needs for annuity/life cross-selling products and the propensity or probability for acquiring them. Subsequently, the retirement service system uses this correlation to identify high propensity clients for acquiring annuity/life cross-selling products. Then, the retirement protection system through the marketing campaign module creates a marketing campaign which includes a marketing strategy for targeting high propensity groups. The retirement service system also includes software modules for providing ongoing services to high propensity target groups. The ongoing service module includes functions such as, for example, automatic reminders to policyholders about payments due, discounts, customer feedback collection, and/or product offerings.

“The disclosed retirement protection system and method are able to conduct advanced analytics to identify propensity of clients which may acquire a combination of annuity and life insurance products. In addition, the disclosed retirement protection system and method creates the opportunity to provide different services and/or products by developing a cross-selling strategy based on individual policyholders’ needs. Tools for cross-selling life and annuity products allows insurers to have a diversified portfolio while increasing sales and creating value for clients.

“In one embodiment, a computer-implemented method comprises selecting, by a server, a set of policyholder records from a policyholder database; determining, by the server, a life insurance and retirement need for each of the policyholders associated with the set of policyholder records; determining, by the server, a propensity for purchasing at least one selected product that satisfies the life insurance and retirement need for each of the policyholders associated with the set of policyholder records and assigning a value to the determined propensity for each policyholder; selecting, by the server, a subset of the set of policyholders that have the highest correlation between the propensity for purchasing and the life insurance and retirement need; and automatically generating, by the server, customized marketing correspondence to the subset of the set of policyholders based upon the propensity for purchasing and the life insurance and retirement need according to a marketing campaign.

“Numerous other aspects, features and benefits of the present disclosure may be made apparent from the following detailed description taken together with the drawing figures.”

The claims supplied by the inventors are:

“What is claimed is:

“1. A computer-implemented method comprising: executing, by a server, an analytical model using a K-nearest neighbor collaborative filtering technique to select a first subset of a set of users; collecting, by the server, a set of data records associated with the first subset of users by scanning at least one social networking database and at least one internal database; determining, by the server using the data scanned from the at least one social networking database and the internal database, one or more characteristics associated with each user within the first subset of users; determining, by the server using the data scanned from the at least one social networking database and the internal database, a first value corresponding to a life insurance or retirement product need for each user within the first subset of users; generating, by the server, a multi-dimensional matrix corresponding to a propensity for purchasing at least one selected life insurance or retirement product that satisfies the life insurance or retirement product need for each user within the first subset of users, wherein the server assigns a second value to each user within the first subset of users based on the respective user’s determined propensity for purchasing the at least one selected life insurance or retirement product, and wherein each user is positioned within the multi-dimensional matrix in accordance with the respective user’s assigned first and second values; selecting, by the server based on a relative position of each user within the multi-dimensional matrix, a second subset of users that have a highest value of correlation between the first and the second values, the second subset of users corresponding to users with a highest correlation between the propensity of purchasing and life insurance or retirement product needs; automatically generating, by the server, a customized electronic mail for each user within the second subset of users, the electronic mail comprising a hyperlink corresponding to an automated transaction platform website displaying the at least one selected life insurance or retirement product in accordance with the life insurance or retirement product need for each user within the second subset of users and based upon the propensity for purchasing the at least one selected life insurance or retirement product for each user within the second subset of users; transmitting, by the server, the electronic mail to a computing device associated with each user within the second subset of users; and training, by the server using a stochastic gradient descent algorithm, the analytical model for future life insurance or retirement product analysis.

“2. The method according to claim 1, further comprising: continuously monitoring, by the server, electronic activities associated with each user within the second subset of users.

“3. The method according to claim 1, further comprising: automatically initiating, by the server, a phone session with at least one user within the second subset of users.

“4. The method according to claim 1, wherein each data record comprises information including demographics, professional background, medical history, and financial history.

“5. The method according to claim 1, further comprising: calculating, by the server, an amount of life insurance for each of the users within the first subset of users based on data in the internal database.

“6. The method according to claim 5, wherein the data in the internal database includes at least one of income, amount of debt, number of family dependents, savings, and monthly family expenditure.

“7. The method according to claim 5, wherein calculating the amount of life insurance comprises determining a trend in inflation.

“8. The method according to claim 5, wherein calculating the amount of life insurance comprises determining a trend in interest rates.

“9. The method according to claim 5, wherein the data comprises at least one of age, gender, postal code, occupational background, monthly expenditures, income, retirement plan, medical history, and marital status.

“10. The method according to claim 1, further comprising: calculating, by the serve for each user within the second subset of users, a lump sum required to fund an annuity.

“11. The method according to claim 1, wherein the propensity determined by the server comprises estimating the propensity at a plurality of predicted life events.

“12. The method according to claim 11, wherein the plurality of predicted life events include at least one of birth of a child, birthday, marriage, accidents, diseases, and death of a relative.

“13. The method according to claim 1, further comprising automatically granting, by the server, access to the automated transaction platform website for each user within the second subset of users to purchase the at least one selected life insurance or retirement product.

“14. The method according to claim 1, further comprising tracking, by the server, users in the subset of the set of users that have purchased the at least one selected life insurance or retirement product.

“15. The method according to claim 1, further comprising automatically generating, by the server, correspondence to each user in the subset of the set of users based on a renewal.”

URL and more information on this patent, see: Ross, Gareth; Walker, Tricia. Systems And Methods For Assessing Protection Needs Of Retirement Services Clients And Determine Cross-Selling Potential Of Customers. U.S. Patent Number 10,366,412, filed December 19, 2014, and published online on August 12, 2019. Patent URL: http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=10,366,412.PN.&OS=PN/10,366,412RS=PN/10,366,412

(Our reports deliver fact-based news of research and discoveries from around the world.)