Every IUL application asks a question most applicants have never thought about: do you want a level death benefit or an increasing one? Option A or Option B, in industry shorthand. It looks like a small checkbox. For a high cash value design, it shapes how the entire policy behaves.
Option A holds the death benefit level. As your cash value grows, the insurance company's true exposure shrinks, because more and more of that death benefit is effectively your own money coming back. The company only insures the gap between cash value and death benefit, and a shrinking gap means shrinking internal charges. Lower charges leave more of your premium compounding. For pure cash accumulation, Option A is usually the efficient pick.
Option B stacks the death benefit on top of the cash value, so the total payout grows as the cash grows. Your family gets the coverage plus the savings, which sounds strictly better until you see the price. The insurer's exposure never shrinks, so the internal charges stay higher, and the cash value compounds slower every year those charges run.
So why does anyone pick B? Funding room. The IRS limits how much premium can go into a given death benefit before the policy becomes a MEC, and an increasing benefit raises that ceiling during heavy funding years. A common design starts at Option B while you're funding hard, then switches to A once the heavy funding slows, capturing the bigger limits early and the lower charges after. The speed limit itself is the subject of The MEC Line: Why Your Policy Has a Funding Speed Limit.
Which option fits you depends on what the policy is for, and that's a design question before it's ever a product question. The design page walks through the levers. An agent who asks what you want the policy to do before quoting anything is the kind to keep.