How Ladder Helps Consumers Make the Most of Life
At Ladder, we’ve been pioneering a revolution in life insurance and we’re committed to resetting expectations by bringing ease and transparency to a critical area of the financial world. Life insurance has become unnecessarily complex and confusing over the years. We’re ushering in change with cutting-edge technology and a paradigm shift that embraces a customer-focused approach. And we’ve proven that consumers are ready for a modern solution to life insurance. As we continue to grow and expand across the country, it’s been rewarding to see how customers — and the industry overall — are embracing Ladder’s approach.
Technology-enabled banking and investing have grown in leaps and bounds in the last decade, but life insurance hadn’t yet embraced what consumers want, need and deserve. At Ladder, we asked why? While leaders in the life insurance space recognize the value of technology in simplifying processes, they are hamstrung by legacy technology that is focused on commission-driven brokers and agents. This conflict has made any change slow and difficult. At Ladder, we have chosen customers over agents and transparency over complexity.
As a company, Ladder has ambitious goals, but our fundamental purpose is simple: to make life insurance accessible, affordable and convenient. We’ve built our proprietary technology from the ground up to enable us to make profound and impactful changes to a fundamentally broken process. We ship code 10x a day to continuously improve the experience for consumers and we use design thinking — a solution-focused approach to designing a product with our customer’s needs in mind. The result? Instant decisions on fully underwritten policies (up to $8M) in a matter of minutes versus the industry standard of eight weeks. There are no hidden agendas or fees, no upselling or ‘gotchas’, no incentivized agents or complex processes.
Since our launch, Ladder has expanded to 49 states and DC and has placed over a billion dollars in coverage. We’re seeing over 60% of our business at Ladder happens outside business hours and more than 50% of transactions happening on mobile devices, which goes to show: people want to take control of life insurance whenever and wherever it is most convenient for them, on their own schedules, not an agent’s.
Customers love Ladder because they can secure policies and make adjustments to (or “ladder”) these policies at any time, to ensure they have the right coverage at the right time, and aren’t spending more than they need to. And it’s not just customers who recognize Ladder’s innovation — the industry is also taking notice.
As we announced this morning, Ladder has just secured an additional $10M strategic investment from Allianz Life Ventures and Northwestern Mutual Future Ventures, taking our total funding raised to-date to over $54M. This investment from two of the most renowned companies in the insurance industry not only provides us with additional funding to continue growing, it demonstrates a broader recognition of Ladder as leading innovation in life insurance online, helping tackle the challenge of fewer households buying life insurance than ever before, and charting the future of the industry.
Life insurance changes lives. That’s why we’re here — to change life insurance for the better. We can’t wait to share what’s next with you, and we are eager to help even more Americans get the coverage (and peace of mind) they deserve.
