Life insurance has always been a tougher sell than any other kind of insurance.
The 1990s saw major carriers, particularly those with big presence in health insurance at that time, bow out of offering life policies, because acquiring those policyholders was proving costly unless a customer would pay a high premium for more coverage. In addition, during that same period, stricter medical testing to get coverage was deterring people from getting policies. As a result of these factors, all the way to the present day, about 50% of U.S. residents still do not have individual life policies.
Bob Gaydos, CEO and founder of Pendella Technologies, began thinking about this problem about 10 years ago, as he started to see the use of digital technology and big data increasing in the insurance space. Gaydos saw that underwriting life insurance could eventually be done instantly with this improved technology and eventually wrote a business plan to capitalize on this capability. Pendella launched in March 2018 after first considering underwriting life coverage but instead pivoting to building the technology necessary to offer coverage. Pendella uses Assurity Life Insurance, Haven Life, SBLI and Guarantee Trust Life Insurance (GTL) as underwriters for its life policies.
Pendella Technologies is built around a recommendation engine that evaluates prospective policyholders and customizes life insurance offerings accordingly. “Just recommending the amount of life insurance is easy. I can do that in three questions. But what’s the appropriate underwriting journey? What’s the appropriate product? What’s the appropriate outcome I should tell you is going to happen?” says Gaydos. “For the engine to have purpose, we have to have multiple products and multiple journeys so that we could take care of everybody.”
Pendella’s recommendation engine can evaluate potential policyholders to determine coverage, using more than just the conventional criteria. “If you compare two 50-year-old men, who both drive a truck and both have diabetes, everything might look the same about them,” says Gaydos. “But one has an 800 credit score, owns his house and shops at Whole Foods. The other one has a 550 credit score, rents in a bad neighborhood and shops at 7-11. Which one is going to take care of the diabetes properly?”
Also, Pendella found a familiar avenue for reaching life insurance customers, but put its own spin on that. Companies’ HR departments usually offer some life insurance coverage for employees, at a relatively low coverage level but with the option for the employee to pay for more coverage. Professional employer organizations (PEOs) now exist to handle HR functions especially for small and medium sized businesses. In June, Pendella announced that it had created a digital life insurance solution for Simploy, a PEO company.
Providing life insurance for a company means covering many different people, rather than one specific individual customer. Pendella’s technology makes it cost-effective to do this, according to Gaydos.
“If you give me 5,000 people on an employer platform from 100 different employers, I know I have all demographics,” he says. “I’ve got millennials, baby boomers, echo boomers, all of them. I have single people, couples, married people, people with bad credit, people with good credit. I need to make sure that I can take care of all of them.”
