Chubb Life brought Life Lens to the New Zealand market in May 2026 and says it is the first life insurer in the country to use the technology in a new business application. An adviser sends a link, the applicant holds a phone still for forty-five seconds, and the camera reads the light coming back off the skin.
What it does with what it finds is narrower than the name suggests.
Life Lens decides which health questions an applicant is asked. It does not decide whether cover is offered, at what price, or on what terms.
Before the health questions
Blood absorbs more light than the tissue around it, and Chubb's adviser guide explains that the reflection off the skin changes "depending on your blood pressure and blood sugar levels". The scan is registered by the adviser, taken by the applicant on their own phone, and completed before any health and lifestyle questions are answered.
Scanning is optional. Anyone who would rather not can apply the ordinary way.
It chooses the questions, not the price
Life Lens sorts an applicant into one of three sets of health questions: a fast-track set, a tailored set carrying one to three additions, or the traditional set. That is the whole of its function. Chubb Life's adviser FAQ states that "the scan doesn't determine eligibility, exclusions or loadings, and any scan results will not be required to be disclosed through the application process".
Your adviser does not see the numbers either, only which question set you have been given.
Your results email
You do get the numbers afterwards: blood pressure, blood sugar, a ten-year cardiovascular risk figure and a heart age set against actual age, each beside a table showing where the reading falls.
Chubb is candid about what this is worth. The email says that Life Lens "is not a health service and the results are not medical results or a diagnosis of any medical condition", and that it measures these things differently from the way a doctor would.
Little is kept. No image or record of the face is taken or stored, Chubb receives data tables describing the scan, and those are destroyed after thirty days. New Zealand has had rules written for this kind of processing since the Biometric Processing Privacy Code 2025 came into force on 3 November 2025, with existing users required to comply by 3 August 2026.
New customers only
Life Lens is offered to new Chubb Life customers aged 18 to 60 applying for an Assurance Extra policy, on a smartphone from 2019 or later. Fast-track treatment carries its own ceilings: $1,000,000 of life cover, $1,000,000 of trauma cover.
A pilot in South Africa, a cuff minutes later
Chubb does not name the company behind the technology. Hannover Re has published a study of the same family of it, transdermal optical imaging from the Canadian firm Nuralogix, run over 26 weeks with 1,650 people at two South African insurers. Blood pressure came in above 90 per cent accuracy. The reinsurer also recorded that "there were more type 2 errors where video selfies incorrectly predicted low blood pressure despite actual readings being normal", and that predictions for HbA1c and cholesterol were less reliable. Its conclusion was that a scan belongs alongside underwriting, not in place of it.
I ran the scan on myself before sending anyone else to it, under a fictitious name and a date of birth that made me fourteen years younger than I am. The blood pressure came back at 115/73. A cuff, a few minutes and a cup of coffee later, read 127/95. Coffee alone will move a cuff, and neither figure is the truth about anybody.
The heart age was more instructive. My fictitious 33-year-old was given a heart age of 30, which is no compliment to a man of 47: heart age sets your readings against a benchmark for the age on the application, so change the date of birth and the answer changes with it.
The practical point
If the scan is offered, take it. The likely reward is a shorter set of questions, and no route exists by which the result raises what you pay. Read the email that follows as a curiosity, not a report. If a number in it worries you, particularly the blood pressure, the answer is a proper cuff and a doctor rather than a second scan.
If you have already scanned and felt uneasy since, there is nothing to undo: the result never reached your file, your adviser never saw it, and the data was destroyed after thirty days.
A scan happens once, at application. Cover is reviewed by Lagervik Private Clients once a year for every client, and again on a birth, a sale, new debt or a change in income.
Arrange a time to talk. We meet in person, in Hamilton or wherever suits you.
Sources: Chubb Life, Life Lens FAQs (CIG0478) and the Life Lens adviser page; Chubb Life, Life Lens quick reference guide (CIG0476); Hannover Re, AI video technology for health and risk insights; Office of the Privacy Commissioner, Biometric Processing Privacy Code 2025. The scan results quoted were recorded in August 2026.