Mutual prosperity: a new approach to insurance

Back in 1789, Benjamin Franklin commented in a letter to a friend that there were only two guarantees in life: death and taxes. Jump ahead 232 years, and Franklin’s adage holds true in an ever-changing world. But another certainty has sprung up: old-school financial service providers who dangle carrots to secure sales and collect fees, but wield a stick when it is time to give benefits and value. Traditional life insurers may be the biggest culprits of such perverse behaviour.

What if, instead, your entire relationship with your insurance provider was one of “mutual prosperity”? A transparent, open and mutually beneficial interaction between customer and life insurer that delivers the best for both. Mutual prosperity underpins Elevate’s approach to life insurance; one which we believe is overdue across the entire industry. 

It’s quite simple really: our mission is to help you to enjoy a full, prosperous and happy life – because that’s good for both you and our business. And a large part of this is that we want to work with you to help sustain and improve your health and wellness on an ongoing basis, so that you get the utmost value: not just from your insurance products, but from life itself.

It’s easy to say all of these things, but harder to do. Meaningful change doesn’t come easy. By combining cutting-edge technology, easy and flexible access to your policy information, a fresh approach to underwriting and constant risk management, we bring life, disability and severe illness insurance that truly elevates your life. 

Here are three key things you need to know about how Elevate achieves more prosperous insurance for our customers:

1. Policyholder journey

We’ve built our products on market-leading technology to ensure excellent customer experience and superior value. We have entirely digitised the policyholder journey from quoting and underwriting, to policy endorsements and claims submission. It doesn’t matter whether you choose to onboard through your broker, or directly: the journey takes place through the same digital process.

This results in an entirely paperless policyholder journey, which in turn increases the speed, convenience, and quality of engagement of all our interactions with customers.

2. New-generation underwriting

We’ve adopted a unique approach to underwriting our life, disability and severe illness policies that saves you time and allows us to use more accurate and comprehensive information with which to generate the best, individually bespoke policy for you. 

To the extent possible, our goal is to replace exhaustive underwriting questionnaires and health check-ups, and instead first ask your consent to access your relevant health and wellness information. This includes medical scheme data (to assess physical health), wearable data (to assess your lifestyle wellness), and your credit reports (because financial health matters, too). It’s up to you how much or how little data you allow us to access; this process is about active engagement, choice and control. The more we can analyse and understand your data, the more we can avoid many of the initial traditional underwriting questionnaires and health checks, reduce any ambiguity in the process of what information you need to disclose, and set up your policy faster and more accurately.

Any underwriting information that is still required is captured through a dynamic, online, user-friendly questionnaire. 

3. Ongoing positive engagement

We ask your permission to collect your health, lifestyle, credit and financial data on an ongoing basis. Our systems continuously analyse this information, which allows us to maintain an up-to-date view of your risk profile. 

This allows us to give you monthly wellness goals, generously reward you for improving and maintaining lifestyle behaviours, and intervene if behaviours and/or events in your life trigger an increase in your risk of premature death, disability or suffering a severe illness. These rewards are not a marketing gimmick or something that you have to pay extra for. They are a standard part of every Elevate policy. Our rewards are designed such that if we work together to help you live a longer, healthier life it means that you are at a lower risk of death, disability and severe illness – and as such you should pay less every month for your risk cover.

Worry less, live more

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the World Wide Web, has a vision for how business can be done in this internet era: “Companies must look beyond next-quarter results and understand that long-term success means building products that are good for society and that people can trust them.”

We agree. Our customers are empowered, activated, and connected – an exercise in mutual prosperity that benefits both you and us. Offering open, transparent services at every step of the life insurance journey makes business sense and leaves you with time to do what really matters: worry less, and live more.

Yours in mutual prosperity,

Matan Abraham, CEO of Elevate