Customer-centric permanent life insurance?
Many say it’s an oxymoron. In an era when most of us are used to accessing information and products at our fingertips, these are all too common experiences we hear:
- Receiving conflicting recommendations from various life insurance agents and companies 😖
- Cringing at the thought of getting blood drawn for a life insurance application 💉
- Waiting for months for an approval ⏰
- Still confused about policy details after getting a plan 🤯
Prior to Amplify, my own experience mirrored many of those pain points. I purchased a universal life policy myself after getting married. After meeting with an agent, I liked the benefits but realized that there was no place to research and compare quotes on my own. All the product information was filtered through the agent in myriads of spreadsheets and brochures. After getting approved, I almost gave up because I couldn’t figure out where and how to pay for the policy besides using a physical check! The experience of getting a permanent life policy was vastly different from any other product I had purchased. It felt like navigating through a blackbox gated by life insurance agents and wired by phones and paper. A customer-centric experience aims to remove all friction in a customer’s journey. In permanent life insurance, that means easy access to information, personalized products and services, fast and painless underwriting, and a seamless post-purchase experience.
Before we go further, you might ask: what is permanent life insurance?
You can read more details here (yes, we put all the information in one place!) The first known life insurance policy was issued in the 16th century. Since then, the industry has gone through many product and regulatory cycles but mainly evolved around agent-driven education and distribution. Sales agents traditionally serve as the gateway between customers and insurance products. As more experienced agents move upmarket to focus on corporations and affluent customers, they have been leaving the mass market behind. Permanent life remains difficult to access for mass consumers due to education and distribution barriers.
Existing life insurance carriers and brokerage firms have been unable to break those barriers due to two major challenges: (1) the current system is designed for agent-driven distribution. It is designed with minimal interaction with end-users and little automation; (2) much of the permanent life insurance industry is still running on legacy infrastructure, which hinders innovation.
Why we built this technology
The magic of technology is in its ability to serve the masses efficiently and make the world a flatter, better place. Amplify is a technology-enabled life insurance investment platform that is bringing that same vision to hundreds of millions of mass-market consumers in the U.S. With Amplify, we are providing information transparency and simple access to financial security through a digital platform so that every consumer is empowered to make the right decisions for their financial future.
When we started Amplify, we realized that in order to deliver modern experiences to customers, we needed to rethink and build our core platform from the ground up based on first principles. We built our own quoting engine to provide quotes in seconds to customers so that they don’t have to speak with a person just to view quotes. We personalize plan information and application flow based on each user's preference, whether they prefer a digital or human-assisted process or a combination. We are also streamlining the approval process with pre-underwriting and instant decisioning so customers don’t have to go through the hassle of getting a medical exam and wait for weeks to get covered. We are in the dawn age of transforming how consumers obtain financial security.
Customer centricity also stems from innovation in insurance products. At Amplify, we are redefining the meaning of life insurance and enabling customers to use their life insurance for saving and investments. Imagine that you can invest in alternative assets inside your life insurance policy and access the growth in a tax-efficient manner. We are leading a new wave of life insurance products that empower customers to build security and wealth however they want.
Amplify’s offerings today tap into a sliver of what’s possible with permanent life insurance products, and we’re working to expand that while building the most customer-centric platform for millennial and Gen X customers who are eager to take their financial future into their own hands -- the movement is just getting started.