A life case is decided by evidence and by rules. The evidence is medical and financial, and it has to be ordered before it can be assessed. The rules turn what comes back into a class and a table rating. Software runs most of that and shows its reasoning.
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Written by Illia Pinchuk, CEO, DICEUS
Last updated October 2026
Life underwriting runs on a vocabulary that is precise and largely unexplained anywhere public. Seven terms that appear throughout this page:
Attending physician statement. A report requested from an applicant’s own doctor, covering history, diagnoses, and treatment. It is the slowest item in most life cases, because it depends on somebody else’s office.
Electronic health record. Where an APS is a document a physician writes, an EHR feed is structured clinical data pulled directly. It arrives faster and in a form a system can read without transcription.
The grid that decides what evidence a case needs. A 35-year-old applying for $250,000 and a 55-year-old applying for $2 million do not get the same requirements, and the matrix is where that is set.
The band an applicant lands in – preferred plus, preferred, standard, and below. It sets the base rate before any further adjustment.
What happens when a case is accepted but not at standard terms. Tables are expressed as a letter or a number and add a loading, usually quoted per thousand of cover.
The requirement that the person taking out the policy would suffer a genuine loss if the insured died. It is checked on beneficiaries and it is the reason large business cases get more scrutiny than personal ones.
Deciding a case without the full traditional evidence – typically without a medical exam – where the applicant’s profile and available data support it. Not the same as no underwriting: the evidence requirement is reduced, not removed.
The live page lists what the platform has. This lists what happens, in order, and where each capability does its work.
Applications arrive from four channels and are scored before anyone opens them
What the underwriter needs to know before reading a single lab result
The slow part, managed rather than chased
Clinical evidence assessed in one connected workflow
Whether the cover makes sense for this applicant’s circumstances
Where judgment becomes a decision that can be repeated
The system proposes with its reasoning exposed, the underwriter decides
The decision turned into a premium and a document a broker can use
Low-risk cases finish without a desk, under controls that can be pulled
Accelerated underwriting is often described as skipping the medical exam. That is the outcome, not the mechanism. What actually happens is that a case is tested against preconditions, and only cases that clear all of them are decided on reduced evidence. The preconditions are where the risk is controlled, and they are configured deliberately.
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A 42-year-old applies for $500,000 of twenty‑year term cover through a broker. The figures below are from the product’s own demonstration data, not from a client.
Two conditions disclosed, three discovered, one conflict between them. Type 2 diabetes with an A1C of 6.8 and hyperlipidemia are the drivers. An LDL re-test and a cardiology consult are outstanding.
Declared income $185,000, verified at $178,500. Debt‑to‑income 18.2 per cent, premium at 4.8 per cent of income, $250,000 already in force against a maximum allowable face of $5.55 million.
Age and amount put the case inside the matrix. The medical findings classify it to standard with a table B rating rather than preferred. No jurisdiction or eligibility rule is hit.
A recommendation of standard with table B, the two drivers named, the rule hits listed, and the two outstanding requirements flagged. They accept, or they override and say why.
Accelerated underwriting is a supervised practice, not just a product feature. The National Association of Insurance Commissioners has published guidance on how insurers should govern it, and the Society of Actuaries has published research on how regulators approach it. Both are worth reading before buying anything.
Underwriting classes, table ratings, and the age and amount matrix are industry conventions rather than DICEUS inventions. What differs between platforms is how the rules are expressed, who can change them, and whether the reasoning behind a decision survives the decision. Those are the questions worth asking of any vendor, including this one.
The nine steps above describe how the DICEUS Underwriting Workbench sequences life cases, taken from the product documentation. Another platform will order the same work differently. A buyer should expect to be walked through the sequence on real screens rather than told that it exists.
This page explains the work. If you are evaluating software to do it, the DICEUS Underwriting Workbench is the product, and its main page covers commercial and specialty lines alongside life. The health configuration is described separately. Brokers and agencies get their own view of submissions and offers through the same platform.
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