Plum Life Wants to Run Your Web Store

A company that's offering to help life insurance agents start and run their own online sales operations is starting to take shape.

The online store startup, Plum Life, announced its official launch last week.

This week, The Savings Bank Mutual Life Insurance Company of Massachusetts has announced a distribution deal with the Warren, New Jersey-based company.

Plum Life will be offering guaranteed level premium term life products from SBLI through its program, which can connect agents, insurers and consumers through websites and mobile devices.

The Plum Life program also offers tools that can help agents get quotes, submit applications and deliver the policies to the clients.

Plum Life can connect agents with the Swiss Re Magnum automated underwriting system, and Swiss Re serves as the reinsurer for products distributed through the Plum Life program.

SBLI, the initial life insurance supplier, has experimented with other online life sales programs. In 2019, for example, it helped Lifefy Corp. set up an online term life sales system.

Swiss Re also has relationships with many other online life distribution programs.

Why Plum Life?

Other companies also say they can help agents set up online insurance stores.

One difference between Plum Life and some companies that offer similar services is that Plum Life has started out as a company aiming to serve agents, rather than as a company that tried to sell directly to consumers and than drifted, Plum Life says.

Plum Life also a history: Manish Batt, the company's CEO, spent about 20 years life at MetLife before leaving to become a consultant in 2014. While he was at MetLife, he helped Walmart work with MetLife to set up an insurance sales operation.

Bhatt said at a LIMRA conference in 2013, when Walmart was testing the program, that life insurers had try new ideas, and that insurers' real competition was not each other, but "non-consumption."

"If things were working well, they'd be consuming," Bhatt told conference attendees.

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