eLife – digital Life Insurance in the USA

eLife is an online life insurance platform in the US currently attempting to transform delivery of term life insurance products by reducing policy approval and purchase time from weeks to under 15 minutes.

Specifically, eLife has circumvented the archaic purchasing process for life insurance in the U.S. by delivering a vastly improved consumer experience whilst still relying upon an established network of insurance agents in order to achieve scale.

eLife is essentially positioning itself as a SaaS platform to assist insurance companies in accessing the middle market profitably whilst concurrently providing agents with the tools they need to sell life insurance. One unique differentiation is its straight-through automated processing and electronic underwriting capability. This enables real-time assessment and decision making for mortality risk which means that moderately priced, non-med term life policies can be sold completely online.

eLife delivers a vastly improved consumer experience and at the same time enables efficient online product distribution through established networks of insurance agents and call centeres

Christopher Snyder, CEO at eLife, summarized the eLife approach as – “Our innovative platform boasts a vastly improved online user experience for insurance agents. Every step is automated and paper is eliminated“.

Increasingly, customers expect a digital on-demand solution. Although most insurers have established online platforms, very few have addressed the real challenge – developing and scaling new data driven insurance products underpinned by advances in IoT and location based data streams. The real winners of the digital insurance race will be decided on the basis of their product innovations.

Benefit to Customers

• Simple and intuitive user interface.
• Great user experience – Applications approved in real time within minutes.

Benefit to the Insurer

• Electronic underwriting engine including real-time interfacing with third party databases.
• Highly cost effective distribution model.
• Better utilisation of agency channel .

Online distribution and self service models have been quite successful in P&C insurance, however there are very few success stories in the Life insurance field. Some insurers like Mass Mutual (Haven Life) are seeing some fruits from their labor, but life insurance is a particularly challenging field within digital insurance. eLife has made a good start and it will be interesting to see if it sets new standards for the next generation in life insurance product design and delivery.

eLife

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