Bringing empathy to life insurance services

Since our first partnership, seven more carriers have invested in Empathy. They were the first to recognize that continuity of care beyond the payout is very valuable for families, and that has value to them as a carrier as well. When we talk about consumer experience, they hear generational loyalty. When I pitched continuity of care, they heard asset retention. Gradually we saw really significant signals and then results in how much value this brings to the industry. 

When people called their life insurance carriers, it used to sound like, "Sorry for your loss, the check is in the mail." Today, they're hearing, "I'm sorry for your loss, but I'm not going anywhere. We at MetLife or Prudential or New York Life [an early backer of Empathy], your father was with us for the last 40 years. We're not leaving you now. We're gonna stick around for the full range of grief and estate needs. We're gonna stick around for the days, weeks and months after the loss, and we're sending you a complimentary beneficiary care program that has the right amount of human touch and technology."

We took it to the next level. We proved that if you shift from a transaction to a relationship, people will never forget what you did for them. We're seeing how this connects to everything else that is happening in the industry, a relatively antiquated industry that is looking for innovation, looking for customer experience, looking for more engagement during what we all know is the greatest wealth transfer in history. 

They're trying to keep those assets under management. Most of the life insurers I talk to care about the families they serve. They have limitations. Their procurement and IT systems are somewhat slower than some other industries. They're not the fastest moving companies, but they really want to show up for families. The industry was thirsty for a tier one consumer experience, like Apple or Google, with empowering, beautiful design that has a tone and voice that people actually want to hear and want to engage with during what is such an overwhelming moment.

We create a personalized care plan just for you. Then we match you with a dedicated care manager. They're going to be your quarterback for anything big or small for the next two years. If they're not around, you can set appointments with them, but if you need anything 24/7, there's a care team that is always available. 

The app has a lot of time saving tools, big and little, from writing an obituary to a eulogy to getting your VA benefits or deactivating your parents AT&T account, all the way to social media, with just a few buttons. You snap a photo of the death certificate. You snap a photo of the executor approval, and you do what an app would do in 2025 – not fax and email 42 vendors. You can do a price comparison. You can update all the credit bureaus from one place. You can avoid identity theft. You can share the app with family members. You can look into thousands of resources and communities and articles. You can start thinking about probate and estate settlement and navigate what's needed. It's a Turbotax for estate settlement, pre-filling your documents.

Lastly, there's a broad range of emotional tools. Think about anything you would expect a wellness app to do in 2025, but tailored for grief. Grief support, sleep support, grief meditations, grief journaling, podcasting, grief communities, mood tracking and much more.

Because of the uniqueness of the boomers as a generation, we're looking at more money shifting hands than ever before in history. Not enough companies are supporting financial institutions by providing any glue to help them maintain these assets and keep their relationship.

In many cases, it's very easy to understand. It's a business moment of truth. But in life insurance, for many reasons, that wasn't the case. Until we showed up, claim centers were seen as a cost center -- supposed to pay quickly, effectively, accurately, be nice and move on. We're saying, we're going to help you move forward, but not move on. We're going to help you deal with the change you didn't want. 

When you think about reinvestment rates, asset retention, generational loyalty, persistency rates, these are the things we're proving case by case, metric by metric, with all of our carriers. Four and a half years in, with 100% retention of 30 carriers, there is a clear value proposition they see, knowing that by doing the right thing, they're also doing what's good for the business.