数字人寿保险公司Ladder的首席执行官兼联合创始人Jamie Hale看起来像是永久微笑。即使他深入统计数据，他的声音也会带来微笑。
When Hale was 11, his father passed away unexpectedly. His father’s life insurance policy meant he and his mother and brother were able to stay in the same community and continue to be supported by family and friends.
“Life insurance gave us emotional resiliency and it gave us financial resiliency,” he says. Hale went on to Harvard Business School and a career in investment banking. However, he wanted to combine his financial know-how with making an impact. Around the same time, his cofounder Jeff Merkel was leaving his job at Google and struggling with the process of getting life insurance. Hale; his wife, Laura; Merkel; and Jack Dubie, a former Dropbox engineer, decided to found Ladder in 2015.
Life insurance has been sold in the United States since the 1760s, but it’s been slow to digitize. According to a 2017报告from McKinsey & Company, 90% of life insurance policies in the United States are sold through agents or a broker instead of directly from a company, and for traditional life insurance companies, up to 40% of their expenses are tied up in their core processes, such as relying on commissions to agents, which allow less room for flexibility.
Fast-forward to 2020 and54%美国人的人寿保险涵盖，但是获得人寿保险可能是一个令人发指的缓慢而难以理解的过程。通常，在申请人寿保险之后，每个人都必须承保或评估其风险水平，以便公司知道如何定价其保单，这一过程可能需要长达几个月。Ladder是一组数字人寿保险公司，例如避风港人寿保险，赐予和Ethos Life，这些公司试图通过提供数字化承销方式来破坏人寿保险行业，以使客户在几分钟之内获得批准。
In particular, Ladder stands out for offering flexible coverage. Customers can easily add or reduce the amount of coverage they want, and see their payments increase or reduce accordingly—although as a caveat, customers who want to increase their coverage must reapply. “Life insurance can be very inflexible,” Hale says. “It can be challenging if you want to reduce coverage. We wanted to solve that problem.”
He notes that it is harder for traditional companies to offer this kind of flexibility because so much of their costs are tied up in the underwriting process. Hale credits Ladder’s flexibility with its high customer retention rate. “We’ve only lost 3 to 4% of our customers a year,” he said.
Since the start of the pandemic, Ladder has seen an increase in customers, particularly millennials who are looking to protect their families during uncertain times. Late last year, the Palo Alto firmannouncedit had raised $100 million in Series D funding from backers led by Thomvest Ventures and OMERS Growth Equity. In 2022, its year-over-year growth has tripled. Ladder has issued over $42 billion in coverage, and its employee headcount has more than doubled since the pandemic started.
Today, Hale’s biggest challenge is growing Ladder while maintaining a focus on its employee culture and processes. “Life insurance is an act of love,” he says. “You don’t do it for yourself. You do it for your family.”