The Wall Street Journal - USA (2020-12-02)

B4| Wednesday, December 2, 2020 ** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

TECHNOLOGY WSJ.com/Tech

launched three years ago and

has sold more than $10 billion

in term-life-insurance cover-

age through North American

Co. for Life and Health Insur-

ance.

It has signed a definitive

agreement to acquire Centu-

rion Life Insurance Co., an

Iowa-based insurer that isn’t

currently selling new policies

but is licensed in nearly all

states.

Bestow is funded by enti-

ties including venture-capital

fund Valar Ventures and

Sammons Financial Group,

which owns North American

Co. and other insurance busi-

nesses.

New York-based Dayfor-

ward has obtained an insur-

ance license for a subsidiary it

established in Texas and is fil-

ing for approvals in other

states. It aims to write policies

within weeks and expects to

be national in two years, Mr.

Shapiro said.

Dayforward aims to offer

policies with unconventional

benefit arrangements: For in-

stance, paying beneficiaries

the equivalent of a biweekly

salary, rather than a lump

sum.

“A lot of why we wanted to

become a carrier was, we can

design products like this,” Mr.

Shapiro said.

Dayforward was founded

this year by Mr. Shapiro, for-

mer chief executive and co-

founder of digital marketing

agency Huge Inc. Maria T.

Vullo, a former superintendent

of New York’s Department of

Financial Services, serves on

Dayforward’s board.

A unit of reinsurance com-

pany Munich Re will reinsure

Dayforward’s policies, and its

venture arm is among finan-

cial backers.

Bestow and Dayforward

aren’t the first insurers to go

with online underwriting, an

approach that seeks to elimi-

nate time-consuming blood

and urine analysis.

Among well-established in-

surers issuing policies in real

time is Massachusetts Mutual

Life Insurance Co., with its Ha-

ven Life unit. This year, the

coronavirus pandemic has

heightened interest in going

online.

As insuretech was heating

up a decade ago, the life-insur-

ance industry seemed poised

for an overhaul.

Instead, life-insurance

startups have lagged behind

other types of insurance due

to ultralow interest rates and

other factors, according to

consultants.

“It is even more of a stark

picture now” than a few years

ago, said Kweilin Ellingrud,

head of the life-insurance

practice at McKinsey & Co.

“Interest rates were low then

and now they are even lower.”

In contrast, car and home

insurers pay out in claims

much of what they collect an-

nually in premiums, so low in-

terest rates have been less

damaging, she said.

Some 80% of insuretech

funding went into property-ca-

sualty in recent years and is

now running at about two-

thirds, said Matt Adams, who

heads the U.S. insurance prac-

tice for PwC. Some property-

casualty startups already have

become publicly traded com-

panies.

Car and home insurance are

“things you have to buy and

are more easily understood”

by consumers than many life-

insurance offerings, and thus

lend themselves more easily to

innovative tech strategies, Mr.

Adams said.

to be tapped.
Mr. O’Banion said that all
applicants will be assessed on-
line, with no additional medi-
cal details to be sought.
For a small percentage of
applicants with health compli-
cations, Dayforward CEO
Aaron Shapiro said the com-
pany may dispatch at-home
medical kits that could add a
day or two to the process.
Dallas-based Bestow was

Continued from page B1

Startups

Launch

Insurers

productivity for the agent and

increase customer satisfaction

for people calling in,” Mr. Au-

gustin said.

Andy Jassy, chief executive

of Amazon Web Services, an-

nounced the new features at

AWS’s annual re:Invent confer-

ence, held virtually, on Tues-

day. Customers can ask to use

two of the services in “pre-

view” mode, and the other

three are available to all cus-

tomers beginning Tuesday.

Amazon Web Services’

cloud-based contact-center

product, Amazon Connect, was

launched in 2017 and now has

thousands of customers in-

cluding Capital One Financial

Corp., Best Western Interna-

tional Inc. and Square Inc.

More than 5,000 contact

centers were set up on Ama-

zon Connect during March and

April of this year, according to

a spokesperson for AWS.

Making it easier for agents

to look up information and an-

swer questions faster means a

company might not need as

many agents to answer calls,

said Drew Kraus, vice presi-

dent of research at technology

research firm Gartner Inc. Us-

ing technologies such as AI

“can help reduce the biggest

part of customer-service oper-

ating costs, which is the head

count,” Mr. Kraus said.

The cloud-based contact-

center market has been grow-

ing in popularity over the past

five years and includes players

such as Genesys Telecommuni-

cations Laboratories Inc.,

Five9 Inc. and NICE inContact,

which offer software tools that

make it easier for agents to

work from anywhere.

The alternative is the on-

premise contact-center model,

where Cisco Systems Inc. and

Avaya Inc. are major players,

with agents typically working

on a company’s data and com-

munication network in a phys-

ical office.

This year, as agents needed

to work from home, many

companies have opted to set

up contact centers in the

cloud. “The pandemic just

poured gas on that fire,” Mr.

Kraus said.

Giving agents access to con-

tact centers in the cloud can

be a simpler way of handling

customer calls securely than

extending an on-premise sys-

tem to agents’ home offices,

which may require special

data connections, firewalls and

virtual private networks, some

analysts say.

At the end of 2019, there

were about 15 million contact-

center “seats,” or technology

licenses for agents, world-

wide, said Sheila McGee-

Smith, an independent indus-

try analyst covering the

contact-center market. She ex-

pects the share of those that

use cloud-based tools will rise

to roughly half in the next five

years or so, from about 20% at

the end of 2019.

Amazon Connect benefits

from the machine-learning and

other cloud-based tools that

AWS brings to bear, Ms. Mc-

Gee-Smith said. “You’re not

buying into Amazon Connect,

you’re buying into the AWS

ecosystem,” she said.

Amazon’s world-wide mar-

ket share in the cloud was 45%

in 2019, according to Gartner,

with Microsoft Corp. its near-

est competitor with nearly 18%.

One of the new Amazon

Connect services available in

preview mode, Wisdom, uses

machine learning to search

through several applications

and databases as the customer

and agent are talking.

Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud di-
vision Tuesday said it is intro-
ducing new features to make it
easier for call-center agents to
help customers, amid growing
demand for cloud-based cus-
tomer-service centers during
the coronavirus pandemic.
Among the five new tools
are one that uses artificial in-
telligence to help agents an-
swer questions almost instan-
taneously and one that
aggregates information about
the customer from disparate
data sources. Another makes it
easier for customers to au-
thenticate themselves when
talking to an agent.
The new features will help
customer-service agents who
are working from home while
managing an increased volume
of calls about everything from
changes to travel plans to inqui-
ries about unemployment bene-
fits, said Larry Augustin, vice
president of business applica-
tions for Amazon Web Services.
“The idea is to increase

BYSARACASTELLANOS

Amazon Boosts Cloud Call-Center Tools

New features will help

customer-service

agents who shifted to

working from home

Amazon Robotics’ chief technologist, Tye Brady, spoke at the Amazon Web Services Summit in 2019.

DEAN LEWINS/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK

Bestow and

Dayforward aren’t

the first to go with

online underwriting.

The road to streamlined

compliance is clear.

Move from manual spreadsheets and disconnected workflows

to centralized, automated third-party risk management.

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