Bestow’s Enterprise SaaS Solution and Partnership with Equitable

This past December, Bestow debuted our enterprise solution and announced the launch of our partnership with Equitable, a leading life insurance provider that has been in the business for more than 150 years. This launch was months in the making and represents a turning point in how traditional life insurance companies can do business.

Here is what our CEO, Melbourne O’Banion, had to say about this announcement:

Bestow was founded with the bold mission to make life insurance coverage accessible to millions of underserved families. We started by building a platform that powers a direct-to-consumer experience that is 100% online and never requires a medical exam. But we’ve always known that to realize our mission, we needed to build infrastructure that catapults the industry forward, which is why we scaled our business to also support advisor-led sales and launched an embedded solution for leading fintechs. Now, we are introducing our platform as a SaaS solution to select carriers.

Carriers need a single, full-stack solution

Today’s life insurance carriers recognize the value of digital life insurance: greater operational efficiencies, the capacity to sell and service more policies, and an improved shopping experience for the modern consumer. Yet until now, there hasn’t been a sophisticated, single-source solution for them to make the shift. We developed Bestow’s enterprise solution in response to the challenges that prevent carriers from launching and optimizing digital product offerings.

Previously, insurers that attempted to launch digital life insurance products had to cobble together several providers’ services. This approach left carriers managing multiple vendors and products that have inherent challenges speaking to each other. In this case, patchworking these different providers together tended to replace one costly and complex system with another.

Other carriers have tried to build their solutions in-house but have faced obstacles related to pairing legacy systems with new product development. Forming tech teams and building infrastructure is no easy feat. It has its own set of challenges, including increasing competition to attract and retain top talent, unanticipated delays and rising budgets, and the tendency to prioritize sustaining current systems rather than building disruptive new ones.

Bestow’s enterprise offering addresses the challenges that have burdened life insurance providers in the past by providing:

• Product development expertise and insight for a transactional marketplace
• Integration with existing advisor tools
• White-labeled, mobile-first online enrollment in minutes, from start to policy delivery
• Instant, 100% digital underwriting
• Policy administration
• Real-time data and actionable analytics

And we can do all of this together in months — not years.

How we partnered with Equitable

As one of the industry’s largest and most respected carriers, Equitable was an ideal first enterprise partner.

The new term life insurance product is powered end-to-end by Bestow’s life insurance platform and pairs the best of digital distribution with the knowledge and confidence of Equitable’s network of more than 4,000 financial advisors. Existing and prospective Equitable customers work with an advisor to determine their specific life insurance needs and then apply for a policy entirely online. If approved, coverage begins immediately, and a medical exam is never required. Our technology transforms the typical sales cycle from several weeks into as little as five minutes.

Within hours of launching with a pilot group of advisors, Equitable sold a $1 million term life insurance policy through a 100% digital experience. Through our partnership, Equitable can continue providing its advisors with innovative and tailored solutions that help them reach today’s life insurance buyers.

Technology-enabled collaboration will transform life insurance

Today’s customers have come to expect an on-demand, frictionless buying experience for everything — including life insurance — which much of the industry has struggled to deliver. The result is an issue of accessibility and relevance for a product that millions of families need. Studies show technology is a democratizing force for financial inclusion, and simultaneously there’s been an increased interest in life insurance among Millennials and in Black communities. The interest and opportunity are there — the industry simply needs to catch up.

At Bestow, our tech-enabled approach to life insurance expands the market and reaches customers with an unparalleled experience:

• Customers can bind coverage in as little as five minutes.
• Underwriting is 100% instant and never requires a medical exam.
• We’ve underwritten billions of dollars of coverage to a completely new cohort of customers — with 85% new to life insurance.
• While the rest of the industry skews male, we see that our policyholders are a nearly even 50/50 split of men and women.
• Millennials make up about 50% of Bestow’s customer base; Gen X is 43%.
• Gen Z is a growing cohort of policyholders at Bestow and currently makes up 5% of our customer base.

I am immensely proud of our team for their effort, determination and teamwork to launch this partnership. Our learnings from this launch are already inspiring improvements to our platform across our multiple business lines. This is a massive milestone for us, and we look forward to offering our enterprise solution to other select carrier partners.

Companies interested in partnering can send an email to partners@bestow.com.