Life insurance with heart — on yulife’s product launch.
Life insurance. It’s a huge market — c. £10B of premium spent in the UK annually. It’s also boring, undifferentiated and old fashioned. Plus the process of buying coverage is often full of friction, paper-based and time-consuming. 75% of buyers in a recent ABI survey want to be able to buy direct but it’s really hard for insurers to innovate on the sales side without alienating their biggest distributers: offline brokers and price comparison sites. It’s classic channel conflict — in other words, a sector ripe for disruption. We’re delighted that yulife, (a Localglobe portfolio company which we backed with our friends at Anthemis and OurCrowd), is launching their life insurance product today to do just that.
The yulife co-founding team marries deep insurance expertise with a deep customer focus: Sam Fromson, COO; Sammy Rubin, the founder and CEO is the ex-CEO of PruProtect; Jaco Oosthuizen, Head of Insurance and ex-Anthemis investor; Jonathan Roomer, former actuary and head of KPMG’s startup team, and Josh Hart, CTO and co-founder of Chelsea Apps Factory.
yulife’s founders passionately believe in their product, which rewards employees for making healthy financial, physical and mental choices. It combines an incredibly easy underwriting journey — a company can buy coverage online for their employees in a few clicks — with pricing spelled out upfront. Employees can answer 13 underwriting questions and get their policies immediately. This simple, friendly journey is a far cry from the long paper- based forms we filled in at not so long ago to get the team covered here at Localglobe. And with 8.5m breadwinners with dependents not covered by a life insurance policy in the UK and 1.2m businesses who don’t offer life coverage, we believe that making life insurance easy and compelling will significantly grow this market.
Unlike most insurers, the relationship doesn’t end with the transaction. yulife has teamed up with Dr Rangan Chatterjee, the well-known physician, presenter and author, who has taken a role as yulife’s Chief Wellbeing Officer.
His holistic wellbeing philosophy — that your mental wellbeing matters as much as your diet choices and physical fitness — has driven the design of yulife’s in-app game, which rewards healthy behaviour. Users play it to earn yucoin, which they can spend at Amazon, Avios, Garmin and NowTV among others. yulife is more than life insurance — it’s a wellness offering.
yulife’s founders have combined their deep knowledge of the insurance space with a laser focus on the customer. For example, they’ve put in place a simple sounding but revolutionary plan (in insurance terms…) to allow employees to top up their employer-offered coverage or take the policy with them when they change jobs. They’ve also been incredibly thoughtful about engaging with their customers post transaction via their games, rewards and content — it’s early days but the user engagement stats are remarkable. It’s clear that their product is resonating with employers and employees.
Bottom line, we’re huge fans of the yulife team, philosophy and product. We hope you will be too. Check it out here.
