Symetra: SwiftTerm

Symetra Life Insurance Company is a subsidiary of Symetra Financial Corporation, a diversified financial services company based in Bellevue, Washington. In business since 1957, Symetra provides employee benefits, annuities, and life insurance. Its parent company, Sumitomo Life, is one of Japan’s largest life insurance companies and has a rich 100+ year operating history.

Through its’ SwiftTerm offering, Symetra revamped the traditional life insurance process. It developed an end-to-end digital experience that made inroads with a younger generation with different customer expectations. They understood that the 25-to-45-year-old target demographic was digitally savvy and expected fast and convenient interactions with all their preferred companies. In acknowledgment, they set a clear and concrete objective: to allow qualified customers to purchase a policy in as little as 25 minutes.

The SwiftTerm case study is particularly relevant for insurers looking to execute new life insurance propositions. Symetra defined a clear yet ambitious goal and made it a reality. Carriers can learn from their ability to create a product tailored and optimized toward a specific persona. While Symetra is a relatively large organization, they effectively carried out the SwiftTerm initiative by taking a greenfield methodology and using an agile development approach. The team’s mindset towards the SwiftTerm initiative is best encapsulated by its belief, “We have to design systems for the way people are, NOT the way we want them to be.”