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Update News
for December 2008
Here is a quick run-down on what you will find in this bulletin:
Still Coming - No Lapse to Age 121
Improvements to Analysis Programs
Video Tutorials Progress
What's Next?
These topics will be dealt with in more detail throughout this bulletin.
Another year is coming to a close which gives us another opportunity to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. We hope your holiday celebrations are full of family and friends, and that you experience the joyfulness of the season.
Click Here for Compulife president Bob Barney's personal thoughts this Christmas.
Our goal was to introduce our new categories for December 1st and while the project is virtually complete, we will hold the introduction until the middle of December. We had some programming delays during November and while the main part of the work in Windows is wrapped up, we still need to migrate the change into our various versions: PDA and Internet software. We also did not want to release it for the first time at the beginning of a month. We prefer to do the release in a midmonth update to ensure that we can respond quickly if any un-found bugs turn up.
The other thing that will slow the release down is that Bob Barney will be gone on holiday during the second week of December. Therefore, we will wait to release the new categories until Monday December 15th. By that point we should have all our ducks in a line.
So on December 15th, Compulife will be adding a new category to our software called:
In addition to that, ONE company has provided us with rates for the following new categories, all of which will be rolled out on December 15th:
As we have said before, lifetime payment products that go to at least age 121 will be moved from the "to age 100" category into the new "To age 121 Level (No Lapse U/L)". This will include products that are paid-up at age 120, or any product which has a mechanism that ensures the insured cannot outlive the death benefit.
Therefore, if a company has a "to age 100" product, that is paid up for life, that will also fit in the new "to age 121" category.
This will leave only a remnant of "to age 100" products in the old category and we suspect it will soon be a category overlooked by our subscribers.
Therefore, we encourage ANY company that has not yet provided Compulife with "to age 121" products, to do so ASAP.
During November one of our subscribers was kind enough to e-mail his key life company suppliers and draw their attention to the coming change. He was anxious to make certain that those companies take advantage of this opportunity. Here is what he wrote:
I am writing to you personally because we write a LOT of business with you and I NEED you to provide them with the information they need in order to make sure that your company's products are visible in these new categories.
Compulife has thousands of subscribers and you know the old saying, "out of sight, out of mind"…? If you don't provide them with what they need, your products will, at least in these new categories, be "invisible" or non-existent to these subscribers!
I am attaching some information below, which I received from Bob Barney of Compulife, with further explains the new categories and how they will work.
Is this URGENT? I think it is, if you care about whether thousands of your agents will see your product when they are looking for products in these new categories!
I hope you are able to get him what he needs as soon as possible. I can assure you that many of your competitors will be!
If you have any questions about the format of the information needed or any other technical questions about how to get them what they need, feel free to call Bob Barney, of Compulife, at 888-798-3488. Questions about why you should take the time to do this? Call me... [name and phone number of subscriber]
We appreciate the time and effort that this subscriber took in writing this email to each of his companies, and three of them did respond by contacting Compulife. I think they now understand why these new categories could improve their sales and the sales of agents who use Compulife.
As was said in the material attached to the above email:
We expect the limited pay categories to become VERY popular, VERY quickly. I personally will be making very favorable comments about the need for consumers to pre-pay their no lapse UL products as quickly as possible. The sooner that these products are paid up, the quicker that consumers will be able to take advantage of tax deferral on their investment dollars, tax deferred money which becomes tax free money on death. Further, it reduces the likelihood that these products will lapse due to a missed premium which undermines the no lapse guarantee.
If you are a life company, and your no lapse U/L product/software can solve for guaranteed limited payment periods such as those we are adding, we would urge you to provide us with premium examples (as you have with your life payment version), as quickly as possible. You do not want to miss out on this golden opportunity.
Further, on February 1st the category:
will be removed from our software. That will eliminate any of the to age 100 products that may be left in it.
During October we introduced improvements/changes to the Analysis programs in Compulife. These changes are complete and during November a couple of different bugs were found and those were addressed in midmonth updates.
One of the bigger changes to the Analysis programs is the elimination of the old display year by year windows. We have standardized all the Analysis programs to go from the data entry windows directly to the "Print Preview" window. The advantage of the Print Preview window is that the user determines how large the characters are on the display by zooming in or out on the page. This should address past comments that we have had about the current year-by-year displays being difficult to see because the fonts were too small.
We have also updated the Analysis print-outs to use newer Arial fonts rather than the old fixed pitch Courier fonts. This makes the print-outs more attractive and consistent with the rest of the comparison/quotation print-outs that our system is able to generate.
To date Compulife has completed three more video tutorials.
For the U.S. and Canada there are now a total of 5 tutorials.
The first tutorial shows how to request and install a 30 day Free Trials.
The second tutorial shows how to complete the "Dare to Compare Challenge" and, by doing so, how to get 4 free months of Compulife without any obligation to purchase.
The third tutorial shows how to use the Preferred Health Analyzer to determine if you client qualifies for the lower Preferred Plus or Preferred rates offered by life companies.
The fourth tutorial shows how to use the Table rating feature in Compulife in order to add a table rating to Compulife.
The fifth tutorial shows how to use the ROP Analysis feature in Compulife, to determine the effective rate of return being offered in an ROP product. You can view the tutorials by clicking on this link:
The ROP tutorial is not available to Canadian subscribers. Instead the Canadian fifth tutorial shows how to use Compulife new Canadian Critical Illness Comparison software. While we are not offering this software in the U.S., we thought you might like to take a look. If you are selling Critical Illness here in the U.S., let us know and let us know which companies that you are selling for. If we determine that there is sufficient demand, we will give consideration to adding it to the software. Here is that tutorial:
With the changes made to the Analysis programs, the next tutorials that we introduce will show you how to use those Analysis programs. Many Canadian customers really make use of these programs largely because they benefited from seminars that we gave many years ago in Canada. We believe the Analysis tutorials will do for newer subscribers, what those seminars did in years gone by, and will show you why those Analysis options are in our software and how/why they can be used to assist consumers and make your sales presentation much simpler.
Apart from the Analysis tutorials, if you have an area where you would like to see us do a tutorial, drop Bob Barney a note at:
We are now turning our efforts to some maintenance work that is needed to the data entry systems. Those programs have not been updated for quite some time, and some need to be converted to take advantage of the newer programming compilers that we have been using for the Windows software that we already distribute to you.
Having reviewed where we are heading over the next few years, and the changes that we would like to be able to make in the future, we have decided to stop and do a much more extensive overhaul than simply changing our data entry software. We have determine that we would also like to implement a better data storage structure that will make maintenance easier on both a data entry basis, as well as a programming basis.
To achieve our goals in this regard, we will be spending a fair bit of time reviewing our new data storage needs, and then building conversion software that will convert our existing data files into our new data file structure. Once we have done that, we will then introducing new comparison software that does exactly what it does now, but which derives its results from the new data structure. In other words, you will end up with a new program that does exactly what the old program did/does.
Once this first stage is completed, we will have both old program and old data, with new program and new data. Moving forward we will use the old data entry systems to maintain the old version, then converting old data to the new data forms for general distribution.
The next stage is to create the new data entry systems that talk to the new data format. Once we are satisfied that the new data entry system give us everything that we have now, we will then switch to the new data structure alone. We will only do this once we have thoroughly tested the new software to ensure it gives us no problems in maintaining the date. This may take several months. As far as the part you use, by the time we make that transition, you will have been using the new software for several months.
The point of sharing this with you is that the process will be quite lengthy and so from this fall throughout most of 2009, you will not be seeing many changes and improvements to the software that you use, even though the underlying foundation will be going through a massive change. Once the foundation has been reconstructed, and all the tools to work on the foundation have been built, the program will be in a position to make some substantial moves forward.
Think of it as transplant surgery, where you need to keep the patient alive and well, at the same time as you are swapping out the organs.