Age-tech and longevity science
Technologies and research aimed at extending healthy lifespan, liable to upend insurers' longevity assumptions.
Age-tech and longevity science designate the set of technologies, devices and research aimed at supporting aging, extending life and, more ambitiously, extending healthy lifespan. This field covers assistance devices for the elderly, telehealth, but also biomedical research on the mechanisms of aging, some advances of which could, if successful, significantly change life expectancy. For life insurance and reinsurance, this horizon is ambivalent. On one hand, age-tech offers opportunities for products, prevention and morbidity reduction. On the other, an unforeseen acceleration of mortality improvement would constitute a major systemic longevity risk, simultaneously hitting all annuity and pension portfolios, hard to diversify and reinsure. Insurers therefore follow these developments closely, because a scientific breakthrough on longevity would upend the biometric assumptions on which very long-term obligations rest. Age-tech illustrates the sensitivity of the life insurance model to future trajectories of human lifespan.
A major advance markedly extending healthy life expectancy would constitute a systemic longevity shock for annuity insurers, hitting all portfolios at once.
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