Growth in the global life insurance market has been hindered by low interest rates and equity market volatility, says EY Senior Manager David Millar.

“US rates are expected to increase and there will be a shift towards wealth management and retirement products,” he told the Actuaries Institute Financial Services Forum in Melbourne last week.

“This will likely aid top-line growth and stabilise margins in 2016.”

Mr Millar says global life insurers will spend as much as $US180 billion ($249 billion) a year on technology “to enhance efficiency by investing in legacy systems replacement, digitisation and data analytics”.

“But this spend is just making the industry stand still with technology.”

“Robust” life insurance sales in emerging markets last year are expected to be much the same this year, he says.

“As a distribution channel, ‘mobile’ is scaling rapidly across emerging markets fuelled by lower distribution cost and vast mobile penetration.”