Bestow founder and CEO Melbourne O'Banion on the insurance industry, its growth throughout the pandemic and returning to work.
CNBC recently spoke with O'Banion, who says pandemic-induced tailwinds are giving Bestow the ability to bring new products to market as well as use data to improve its artificial and machine learning algorithms.CNBC: Life insurance isn't necessarily the sexiest industry to get into. What was your inspiration?
O'Banion: What I think is so interesting is that as software kind of eats the world and disrupts almost every industry, what's become really unique about life insurance is that it was so void of technology, even compared to other types of insurance.
O'Banion: We did a lot of our research early on to find out whether the demand exists or not. We discovered that there is massive pent up, latent demand by customers who know they need this product, but they just don't have relationships with a traditional agent. They don't believe that a medical exam should be necessary. It's on their to do list — but it's like number 90. So they just haven't gotten around to doing it yet.
I think a lot of the industry looks at us today, and sees us as a direct-to-consumer company. We've expanded this year into multiple business lines. We've developed the best-in-class API integration that allows us to embed life insurance into fintech partner apps or websites, and bundle life insurance in a way that's never really been done before.
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