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Life Demands Transformation

Fidelity Life Association

Moving a venerable insurance company into the digital world

Founded in 1896, Fidelity Life has a long history of continuous innovation to remain relevant as the world around us changes. The Chicago-based company has been focused on making life insurance fast, easy, and affordable for everyday families for decades.

For more than 15 of those years, Fidelity Life has looked to us to help imagine, design, build, and manage its continuous digital transformation, and today, the constellation of custom applications we helped create interact as part of a large system that has transformed the company’s business and served as a model for the modern insurance industry.

Fidelity Life Association iPhone Mockup

Fidelity Life has empowered consumers to buy life insurance directly from their phone.

Fidelity Life Association Project Statistics

Automation drives efficiency. Efficiency drives customer satisfaction.

Data showed that the time it was taking prospective life insurance consumers to move through Fidelity Life's quote to application process was exceedingly long, and lagged that of other direct-to-consumer brands. Friction in the consumer experience caused by many complex and disjointed tasks was compounded by a legacy infrastructure which was unable to scale further as the company prepared for growth.

As 8th Light team members performed design research with Fidelity Life marketing and product teams, they learned that 80% of the steps required manual processes spanning several siloed business units. Inspired by this learning, the team was able to evolve the manual workflow into a new web based tool, called Rapid Decision, that was able to circumvent the organizational challenges and automate a number of key tasks. This new solution cut the application process from a typical 8-12 weeks to just 20 minutes, a tool that remains a central component of the company’s agent-customer workflow platform.

Fidelity Life Association Improved Quote to Application Time Chart
Fidelity Life Association Screen Platforms

Left: Through the Rapid App development, 8th Light helped the company build a greenfield insurance platform that reduced "quote-to-application" time from 8-12 weeks to just 20 minutes.

Center: With FLASH, we helped the company update the look and feel, integrated quoting, initial underwriting decisions delivered in real time as questions are answered.

Right: Finally, we helped the company simplify the application questionnaire and implement mobile-first design, giving power to consumers to purchase life insurance without needing to talk to an agent.

Part of the process. Part of the team.

Three dedicated 8th Light teams, in partnership with Fidelity Life's UX/UI and development teams, cover discrete aspects of Fidelity Life’s ongoing digital transformation, responsible for supporting agent- and consumer-facing applications, critical business systems, underwriting, and reporting. These teams and the tools for which they are responsible provide a level of automation not typical of the insurance industry, while creating a knowledge base that helps inform and shape Fidelity Life’s next-generation thinking.

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Fidelity Life Tablet screenshot

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Fidelity Life Association application lifecycle chart

Our consultants are embedded onto multiple teams at Fidelity Life — each team specializing in a different piece of the application lifecycle.

We have been in partnership with 8th Light for several years, and their contribution to our success in the insurance vertical has been invaluable. Their technology expertise and software engineering staffing have enabled us to develop and maintain a range of proprietary applications that have greatly enhanced our operational efficiency and customer service.

Paul Bourdeaux
Chief Information Officer
eFinancial and Fidelity Life Association

Services

DEVELOPMENT

  • API Development
  • Application Architecture
  • Enterprise Software
  • Software Development
  • Third-party Integrations

DEVOPS

  • Cloud Infrastructure and Migration
  • Solution Architecture
  • System Architecture
  • Test Automation

Technologies

  • C#
  • Java
  • JavaScript
  • Jenkins
  • .NET
  • PostgreSQL
  • RabbitMQ
  • React
  • Ruby
  • TypeScript