VitalityLife has gone live with Swiss Re‘s PromiseXP claims assessment platform across its term life and whole-of-life product lines, in a partnership designed to accelerate claims triage without removing human decision-makers from the process. The deployment is effective now, according to the company.
The PromiseXP platform assesses each incoming claim against its complexity and risk profile, then routes it to the most appropriate assessment pathway. It also handles validation checks covering policy status and eligibility criteria. Crucially, the system does not automate claim declines; every decision involves a qualified claims assessor. The intent is to free those assessors to concentrate on cases that genuinely require detailed underwriting judgement, rather than spend capacity on straightforward notifications.
The numbers behind the move
VitalityLife’s claims volumes have grown sharply. Life cover claims paid rose from £54.3 million in 2021 to £105 million in 2025, a 93 per cent increase over four years. The company reports a 99.4 per cent claims payment rate for life cover in 2025. Sustaining that record while accommodating continued growth in policyholders is the operational rationale for the triage upgrade.
Justin Taurog, chief executive of VitalityLife, framed the deployment in terms of the customer moment rather than the operational saving. “The point of claim is one of the most important moments in the customer journey and, in life insurance, comes during a challenging period of uncertainty for families,” he said. “This technology will help us ensure we continue delivering the high standards of service that members and advisers expect as our business grows.”
Claire Nolan, head of Swiss Re’s Life and Health Underwriting and Claims for UK and Ireland, said the partnership supported the reinsurer’s broader mission of resilience, adding that the arrangement reflected a shared commitment to improving outcomes for policyholders and beneficiaries.
Market and regulatory context
Automated claims triage is becoming a standard capability expectation among larger protection insurers, with several UK life offices and their reinsurance partners investing in similar workflow tooling over the past two to three years. The competitive pressure is partly operational and partly regulatory: the FCA‘s Consumer Duty, which came into full effect for closed books in July 2024, places explicit obligations on firms to demonstrate that outcomes at claims are fair and timely. Triage technology that demonstrably reduces time-to-decision supports that evidential burden, provided it can be shown that routing decisions do not systematically disadvantage any policyholder cohort.
Swiss Re’s decision to productise PromiseXP as a licensed platform for cedants, rather than embed the capability purely within reinsurance treaty terms, reflects a broader trend of reinsurers moving up the value chain into operational technology. Competitors including Munich Re and Hannover Re have made comparable moves into life and health claims analytics. For VitalityLife, using a reinsurer’s platform rather than a standalone insurtech vendor carries an implicit alignment of incentive: Swiss Re’s interest in accurate and efficient claims handling broadly matches that of the direct insurer.
The next markers to watch are whether the platform is extended to VitalityLife’s critical illness or income protection lines, and whether the efficiency gains are quantified in the company’s next annual claims report.
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