Update News for June 2025

Here is a quick run-down on what you will find in this bulletin:

 

• • Why You Should Read These Bulletins
    
    
  • Our Coming 43rd Anniversary
    
    
  • The Pressing Need for A Data Overhaul
    
    
  • Our Current Programming Plans for 2025
    
    

These topics will be dealt with in more detail throughout this bulletin.

Why You Should Read These Bulletins

Last month I did a story on Body Mass Index and noted that some companies are moving to BMI which I view as a nuisance for agents simply as most prospective insurance buyers know their height and weight and have no idea what their BMI is. Further, it is simple enough to convert a BMI value to weight for any given height providing that the life insurance company has identified what conversion calculator they are using.

No sooner had I published that bulletin than I had a subscriber point out we did not have the BMI values for one life insurance company. That meant I got to COPY and PASTE the article from the bulletin into my email response. We continue to work to try to get the life insurance company in question to provide us with access to the calculator that they are using to convert BMI to height/weight so that we can come up with ht/wt charts for that company. Still waiting as of the writing of this bulletin. My point is, had the subscriber read the article, they would have had the answer to their question before they asked it.

Our Coming 43rd Anniversary

Here’s another reason why it pays to read the bulletin. In October Compulife will be celebrating our 43rd anniversary. To celebrate we are temporarily offering a new multiple year discount. Until October 1st, you can obtain a 4 year subscription for 30% off the annual price times 4. Our normal discounts are 10% for 2 years, and 20% for 3 years. Once again, until October 1st we will be giving you the opportunity to pay 4 years in advance and take a 30% discount on the total annual subscription price.

EXAMPLE:   If you are buying a personal use subscription to Compulife, that means you can pay $215 times 4, and take 30% off of that. $215 X 4 – 30% = $860 – $258 = $602 (for an average price of $150.50 per year).

You will want to act on this before September 1st as we will have moderate price increases again this year.

EXAMPLE:  The $215 subscription for a personal use PC version of Compulife will be increased to $220.

Therefore, paying in advance lets you take advantage of the current price and lock it in for the 2, 3 or 4 years, and also take a multi-year discount on that current price.

You can add those 4 years to your current subscription.

We will have more information about the price increases next month. not all prices are going up. For example, term4sale listing fees will be unchanged, as well as the webquote option and that API web quoting options. Compulife Basic, the PC versions, the internet engine and Batch Analyzer will all have small increases similar to the Personal Use example that we have just given you.

The Pressing Need for A Data Overhaul

We continue to press forward with our work on CQS.EXE, in particular the spreadsheet option (which is now called Pick 12). Serious progress was made in May but we are still cleaning up bugs. As we have told you, Windows 11 and our new language compiler both have made changes that are not making that work easy, but serious progress is being made.

We are anxious to get this wrapped up as we have a growing need to begin the process of data restructuring. One company this month introduced new rates in Canada and two limitations in our current data structure underlined the need to move forward.

The first issue is banding and minimum face amount values of over 9,999,999. Currently the largest value that we store for a band or minimum face value is 9,999,999. We now have two companies in Canada, and two companies in the U.S. with $10 million dollar bands. We are currently working our way through that by using 9,999,999 instead of $10 million for the band value. The Canadian company who we entered new rates for in May decided to try testing a 9,999,999 quote and got wrong premiums because we were using the rates for the $10 million band. I explained our limitation and assured the company that there was no agent who was going to quote or attempt to sell a $9,999,999 policy. That settled the issue for now. We will however get stuck at some point once a company rolls out a band value in excess of $10 million which would force us to need to deal with that issue immediately. We have a work around we could use, but that would force ALL internet engine subscribers to have to update their internet engines as the work around would create the need to change the quoting program itself. If we get the data overhaul and new structure in place first, it would mean that the engine upgrade that will be required for that, would also deliver the solution to the band minimum problem at the same time.

The second issue encountered with the same company that has the $10 million band was that the company has 7 rate bands in their rate tables. That exceeds our current limit of 6 bands and so that means we have to use 2 product entries instead of one to quote those products. We are already doing that for a number of companies that currently have more than 6 bands, but I am looking forward to the day when we can store many more bands than 6 which would allow us to eliminate duplicate product entries. The new maximum number of bands will be 99.

In the good old days, when agents carried around rate cards or rate books, and determined premiums with a piece of paper and a calculator, such extremes did not exist because it would have made the calculation process too difficult and mistakes would result. With the advent of computers, actuaries feel liberated to make things just as complex as they like. Complexity appears to help reduce boredom in the job.

These are merely two examples of changes that we need to make and after those changes are made our work will become simpler. Our system was originally designed to be tight and compact, able to run on floppy disks. Space in the good old days was tight and so the focus was on keeping data tight. That is no longer an issue.

The good news is that the new data structure is already in use for renewal rates and it is working quite well. The implementation of that for renewals was none too soon. The Canadian company in question uses HIGHLY complex YRT rate tables that require us to store about 3 megabytes of numbers in decompressed form. Our new data structure for renewals handles that effortlessly. We need to get that new data format implemented for the rest of our rate data.

Our Current Programming Plans for 2025

The following is the current order for new work that we will be doing in 2025:

 

• • Introduction of New PC Version: CQS.EXE.

 

• • Overhaul Of Current Product Data Files.

 

• Introduction of Compulife Mobile Plus (with Pick 12).

Anyone with questions about any of these upcoming projects can call Bob Barney to discuss:

 

Please don’t email me essay questions; just call. If I’m not in, email me your phone number, I’ll call you.

These planned objectives will easily consume our programming time during the balance of this year and throughout 2025. The good news is that once the product data files have been converted, and we have introduced the new CQS.EXE and upgraded our internet engine to use the new data files, Compulife will be turning its full attention to our web based, Compulife Mobile software. The long term goal is to have a web based product that does everything our PC based software does.