In case you have NOT noticed it (particularly for U.S. subscribers) the pace of rate changes is picking up VERY quickly. Where we at one time had rate changes from companies once or twice a year, we are now seeing a handful of companies making change once every couple of months, and have now had a company who made two changes in one month.

Some of that pace has been accelerated by the availability to life insurance companies of the Compulife Batch Analyzer. We know that companies are getting very good at being able to analyze the changing market quickly, and because of that are designing products which allow them to make rates changes even more quickly. You can feel the "buzz" of more frequent changes.

I think that life companies that are NOT using the Compulife Batch Analyzer are going to find themselves at a growing disadvantage in keeping up with the evolving market. Give the very low price of the product, I can't imagine how anyone could do market research for less money.

More and faster rate changes put a larger burden on us because there is much more work to do. NO problem, we are on this and our data entry systems are VERY robust and let us process these changes VERY fast in real time. I am routinely told that we are the fastest (by far) to turn around rate changes.

We are also being told that these rapid changes are becoming more and more problematic for some of our competitors. I knew this day was coming, albeit VERY slowly. I always envisioned the day when 10 life insurance companies send me rates at the same time, and they all tell me those rates will go into effect in 3 days. That hasn't ever happened, but it's what pushes us to steadily improve our methods for handling data. The point is that we have worked hard over the years to make sure that we can turn these rate changes around quickly and that hard work is starting to really pay off.

There are three things worth noting in this regard.

First, make sure that you are getting midmonth updates frequently. The key is to make sure that the automatic update option is "on" (checked) and that the number of days between midmonth update checks is set to either 1 or 0. If you set the daily check frequent to "1" the system will check for updates at least once every 24 hours (when you start the program). If you set it to "0" (zero) then the software will check for a new update every time you start the program. In the good old days there could be delays in checking for updates depending upon how quickly your system let you reach out to the internet, but that is virtually NOT an issue anymore. If it is, set it to "1".

Here is how you check the settings:

1. Go to the top of the Red Menu and click "options".
2. Come down to the option near the bottom which says:
      "Enable automatic downloading from internet".
      If it has a check next to it, you are OK.
      If not, click on the option and it will check it.
3. Again, go to the top of the Red Menu and click "options".
      You should now see the checkmark.
5. Come down to the next option which says:
      "Number of days between update checks".
      The number of days is shown in parenthesis.
      You want that number to be 1 or 0.
6. To change the number click on the option.
      A new window will display asking you to set the value.

NOT everyone should or will do this. Those who should NOT be doing it will ALREADY know that and why. If you are NOT one of those people, you should check and fix if needed.

Second, some life insurance companies are talking about no longer sending us rate changes as they have in the past. Instead they are proposing to have us interface with proposed API systems that they are planning. The idea is that our quoting system would talk to their quoting system and their quoting system would deliver quote information back in real time.

The logic is that when the company makes a rate change, no matter how frequently it makes change, we will not have to do anything because their quotes will reflect the rate change when it happens. I understand the logic of those proposing it, but I do NOT trust that they can deliver a reliable stream of data. Heck, I don't even trust the internet to be working to deliver that quote when our customers is requesting it. I don't want our customers sitting their twiddling their thumbs waiting because a technical problem is delaying or preventing us to get the quote from the company's API.

There is NO need for this. Compulife is able to process rate changes quickly. No matter what they do, companies still have to create rate tables and the only issue is how long after we are sent a rate table does it take for Compulife to get that rate table into our software. I routinely SHOCK life companies with turnaround time. Rates given to us in the morning are often in sample software ready for testing by the afternoon.

I do NOT EVER foresee a day, while I am still alive, where we are going to make the performance of our quoting system dependant on ANY OTHER quoting system - PERIOD. First and foremost I don't trust the internet. If the life company quoting system goes down, it means we can't deliver. When I have the company's rates stored in our own database, there is NO NEED to go elsewhere for information. I trust my product and its quality because we control our products and the quality. I don't trust anyone else to have a greater commitment to their product and quality than I do for our's.

Personnel turnover in the IT market and in large insurance companies is significant. The people you work with today are often NOT the people you worked with 2 years ago. You can't imagine how tricky it can be to just get a company to remember to notify you if they make a change. What if they don't notify you about a change in their API? Suddenly quotes aren't working, and no one knows why. NO THANK YOU!

Compulife has been doing what we do for 40 years. We know what it takes to deliver a dependable quoting system, and what we are doing now, and the way we are doing it now, is the most secure and dependable it can be. I am NOT prepared to make our ability to deliver quotes dependant on someone else's ability to deliver quotes. THAT, is just not going to happen.

Third, and this one is really for our competitors. There are a small group of competitors operating website quote services who have spent time and money on building their own web based quote systems. They don't like the idea of paying Compulife for the work that we do, and would rather build their own and save the cost of paying us.

Let me point out that for serious players interested in doing such things, the cost to have the Compulife product to provide a life insurance quoting service to their customers is VERY, VERY reasonable. Frankly, it's downright cheap. For those bulk buying customer with over 100 of their own customers, the cost of using our software as the quoting platform can be as low as $5 per month per customer. I don't know about you, but that seems pretty darn cheap to me.

Typically our lowest priced competitors will be charging about $20 per month for their version of a web quoting option. What that means, if they are using Compulife, is that they collect $20 for each customer, pay Compulife $5 per month for each customer, and pocket the $15 difference. For the $5 per month Compulife does ALL the heavy listing: making rate changes, making changes to products, adding new products, etc.

We have set up a web page to explain why we are the best at what we do:

Some competitors don't put much value on the updating of rates, but as the REAL competition between life insurance companies starts to ramp up, where life insurance companies continue to make more and more changes, more and more frequently, some of our competitors are going to find that job a bigger and bigger burden. Some are going to fail to keep up, others are going to find they will be paying more and more to keep up with all those changes.

You just have to ask yourself one simple question. Why go to the bother of doing ALL that yourself when Compulife is already doing it better and faster? More important, why would you do that when the cost of using Compulife is SO VERY REASONABLE and we provide software solutions (internet engine) that let you put our software behind the scenes so that YOUR customer doesn't even know it's Compulife that you are using?

You don't actually think that Walmart is growing and canning the peas that they sell in their "no name" cans of peas on the shelf, do you? They make a deal with the companies in that business, get a big discount and re brand the product under the Walmart brand. The big money is in the resale of the retail product, not the manufacturing of the product. The big money in the manufacturing and wholesaling comes from VOLUME. Compulife can handle the volume, maintain high quality and turn around the changes needed faster than anyone else - PERIOD.

In conclusion the third point may seem to contradict the second point. Perhaps the competition is like me, they don't want to put their trust in a third party quote system because they don't ultimately control it. I respect that. Having acknowledged that, I want to emphasize that Compulife's top internet solution means that ALL the software resides on the customer's own server and is fully autonomous. There is NO communication between that server and Compulife's server for the providing of quotes. If a customer does routine updates and backups, there is NO WAY that the Compulife product can leave a customer unable to do quotes. The only hooks are if the data becomes more than 60 days old or if the subscription is no longer current. If those things happen, it is designed not to work.

Working with Compulife will leave you with more money in your pocket. Our profits come from volume. Do you think you can do it better and cheaper than Compulife? I predict you will find out in the next couple of years as the competition between life companies and rate changes accelerate.