Life Insurance 2.0: Helping Families Navigate Life’s Toughest Moments

Calvin Zhai: Hello! Welcome to the Sapiens Insurance 360 podcast. I’m your host, Calvin Zhai, Product Marketing Strategy Manager for Life and Annuities at Sapiens, and I’m so glad that you’re out there listening; this is where we discuss the latest news, trends, insights, and issues from across the insurance solutions and technology landscape.

In the everyday experience of payments, like utilities and groceries, have you, the policyholder, ever sat down to think about the deeper value of life insurance beyond the policy details? That beyond the policies and premiums lies a deeper purpose to life insurance – one where families are given the tools to navigate life’s toughest events. Often, the most unexpected.

Today’s guest is Ron Gura, Co-Founder and CEO of Empathy, the world’s leading support system for navigating loss platform that combines technology and human support professionals to provide emotional and practical support after the loss of loved ones. Ron is a tech entrepreneur who has brought his love for developing empowering products to startups and major international corporations alike. Before launching Empathy in 2020, Ron held roles as a Product Executive at WeWork and eBay. He initially joined eBay after the acquisition of The Gifts Project in 2011, a social E-commerce startup where he served as a Co-Founder & CEO.  Ron, welcome to the program. I am excited to hear about your vision and journey of Empathy!

Ron Gura: Thank you, Calvin. It’s great to be here!

Calvin Zhai: Great, so let’s start by first talking about the original role of life insurance. As we all know, its expressed purpose is to provide financial security for families after a loss. How do you change that transactional expectation and why should a company attempt to do so?

Ron Gura: Absolutely. Well, let’s start with that important point you hit on right there. How do you take a transaction and shift it to our relationship? I think that’s the big question. We are working, and we’re talking right now in the midst of the greatest wealth transfer. Trillions of dollars are moving hands. A third of them, give or take, in life interest premiums. And life insurance companies are just losing AUM because there’s nothing from a user experience standpoint or value-add standpoint, they can do about generation loyalty and asset retention when it’s too late, when the beneficiary who is not the policyholder, unlike most adjacent insurance industries, is just coming away and rightfully taking the funds and moving on, after such a meaningful life event. So what we do is we have a comprehensive, on-demand system that offers grieving families the full range of grief and estate needs. And with that, we offer continuity of care, which leads to asset retention and generational loyalty.

Calvin Zhai: Thanks for that, Ron. So as we know, the life [insurance] industry has traditionally been lagging behind and slow to adopt new technology. What barriers have you faced in bringing a new service model of life insurance to the forefront and how have you overcome them?

Ron Gura: The first thing, I want to give the life insurance industry a little bit of slack. I know some of my best friends, some of your best friends in the life insurance business, and it’s true, they’re not the fastest. But let’s admit it, if someone gets some slack for being risk averse, it’s the life insurance folks because they’re supposed to weather the storm, they’re supposed to avoid mistakes. And what we’ve seen, especially after partnering with more than 30 life insurance carriers, is that they’re really tough on implementation. It really was a big unlock for us to create a situation where we can shift from a deep implementation to a life configuration and just add the empathy touchpoint in a multifaceted way without the need for heavy data transfers and deep integrations with these life insurance carriers.

Calvin Zhai: That’s really interesting, Ron. In light of your previous answer, what lesson can insurance professionals, HR leaders, and financial advisors, take from your model in terms of planning technology and the human component to deliver value to families in their time of need?

Ron Gura: Well, I think it’s about mixing the two. I think there’s no just binary solution when it comes to an infrequent and meaningful life event like a loss. It’s not just technology, it’s not just humans. It’s also not just grief and emotional support, and it’s not just financial and administrative work. Fundamentally, we believe that grief is made hard by logistics, and logistics are made harder by grief. So when you put a cohesive solution in the market, you simply let machines do what machines do really well, like pre-filling forms using GenAI to take away the mundane and doing your financials. Things we use technology for day in and day out. And we let people do what people do best. Being on the other side of the line, showing up with compassion. So it’s that mix that we bring to the market and we believe that not just carriers and tech companies should use it, but also financial advisors, brokers, everyone.

Calvin Zhai: Great. Now, your company, Empathy, combines cutting-edge technology with human care teams. How does this approach improve the customer experience, and why do you think it resonates with both life insurance carriers and policyholders?

Ron Gura: So we set out to create a new standard for supporting families through life’s most difficult moments, and we use technology to make it sustainable and scalable. By offering continuity of care to a beneficiary, you’re not just helping the beneficiary, you’re also adding peace of mind to the policyholder, who before that got financial peace of mind, but now, they know that their carrier is also providing emotional peace of mind and administrative peace of mind on top, because they’re going to show up to the beneficiary at that moment of truth. So if you oversimplify what we do from a user experience standpoint, you can look at a claim call of I lost my loved one, where’s my money, in so many different words. And then, sorry for your loss, your check is in the mail, but we’re not going anywhere. We’re going to stick around with you in the days, weeks, and months.

Calvin Zhai: Thanks Ron. Thanks for sharing that, the valuable insights. So to wrap things up, how do you see technology further enhancing the way families plan for the future and engage with their insurers? Say for example, addressing the gap between traditional estate planning tools and what families really need?

Ron Gura: Yeah, Calvin, we talked about estate settlement, we talked about aid, need, but you’re right, technology could be used and should be used before as well. One of the things that is going to help families the most is actually having their loved ones do some pre-planning ahead of time and just exactly why we launched together with New York Life on stage [at] ITC last October, the LifeVault, the most comprehensive estate planning solution. So feel free to check it out on Empathy.com. But basically what it is, is a very straightforward way to leverage technology to create these legal documents for you. We’re very proud that we are able to add peace of mind from that angle as well.

Calvin Zhai: Ron, thank you so much for your thoughts and for taking the time to appear on the podcast today. Your insights on the importance of combining technology and human support to build connections with families are so impactful and refreshing. I’m sure that our listeners are also impressed by this new framework of life insurance coverage and service, and I hope you can come back again in due time to update us on how it’s working out.

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