Insurance agent — tasks, one by one

Finding and following up prospective clients

Client-management software, messaging apps and language tools sort leads, draft follow-ups and remind an agent who is due for a call. They let one agent keep in touch with more people; getting a stranger to trust you with their family's protection has not moved to software.

This rests on what the tools can do, not on a record of how agents' prospecting has changed.

Working out the cover a client needs and recommending it

Singapore has let people buy simple life policies without an adviser since 2015, when the regulator required life insurers to offer Direct Purchase Insurance priced without distribution costs. A decade later, representatives — insurers' own agents, bank staff and financial-adviser firms — sold about 97% of new individual life and health business by weighted premium in the first half of 2026; policies bought online directly from insurers were 1.0%, down from 1.5% two years earlier.

These are one country's sales figures by channel. They show how policies are bought, not whether the advice was needed, and they do not separate out the digital tools representatives now use; online buying could grow with other products or in other markets.

Filling in applications and collecting documents

Applications are now commonly completed on a tablet or phone, with personal details filled in automatically from digital identity services where they exist, and underwriting rules approve simple cases without a person looking. The typing and chasing of forms that used to fill an agent's evenings is going.

This rests on how insurers' systems work rather than on a record on this site; applications with medical complications still go to a person.

Helping clients make claims

Insurers now take simple claims through apps and pay some of them without a person reviewing them. The agent's part shifts to the hard ones — a critical-illness claim, a disputed exclusion — where the client wants someone on their side who knows the policy.

This rests on how claims channels are changing, not on a measurement of how much claims work agents do.

Reviewing clients' cover as their lives change

What cover makes sense changes with a client's life, and the client usually has to be prompted to look. Software can send the reminder; working out what to add, and what not to cancel, is a conversation with someone who knows the client's situation.

This rests on the nature of the work, and it would change if insurers' apps began recommending changes to cover that clients acted on without an adviser.

Explaining online comparisons to clients

Since 2015 Singapore has had a public web portal, set up by the regulator, the industry association and consumer bodies, for comparing life policies across insurers, and comparison sites exist in many countries. Clients who arrive having compared prices need someone to explain what a table does not show — exclusions, underwriting, riders.

How often clients compare before meeting an agent is not measured here; this is an inference from the tools existing.