Engagement through life insurance with YuLife

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Sammy Rubin: I love your title of “Life & Taxes,” because that's exactly why we set up YuLife. I started my first startup in my 20s, but I experienced some burnout and took some time off. I rejuvenated myself from a wellness perspective and changed my lifestyle to learn about meditation and yoga, and I felt much better inside myself. I then set out on a mission to bring wellness into insurance, because I felt that life insurance by its very nature should be more about life than death. We inspire people to do things every day to live healthier lives. 

The Financial Revolutionist: How have you done that?

Instead of having one touch point per year, we have around 120 touch points with our clients per year on average. We do that through gamification and through a currency of wellbeing called YuCoin. So beyond our life insurance product, we’ve created virtual worlds in which you’re encouraged to do quests and everyday challenges like a five-minute walk or meditation. You go through different levels, and as you’re going through these levels your wellbeing increases, you compete against your colleagues through leaderboards, and you earn YuCoin. You can exchange YuCoin for Amazon vouchers, or at Walmart, or ESG initiatives. 

Why gamification?

My co-founder, Josh Hart, is an obsessive gamer. We were together on the London Underground, and he said, “Sammy, look around at what people are doing: Most people are on their phones.” And we saw they were playing Candy Crush. They had had a long day and were looking to escape whilst on the train home. Gamification has sort of grown and grown over the last five years—and it’s not just twenty-somethings and millennials. 

We looked at that and we said, “Okay, so how can we apply gamification to this very old traditional industry?”

How does YuLife’s pitch resonate with Chief People Officers and other HR leaders?

When we go to a Chief People Officer, they're now looking at their insurance spends post-Covid and thinking about how they can make their benefits more engaging for remote workers and enhance their culture. We're presenting ourselves not just as another insurance, but as a holistic platform. For a Chief People officer, YuLife can turn insurance spend into something that brings daily value—enhancing culture, enhancing employee engagement, and enhancing productivity. 

We both have a direct team that go to conferences and engage with these leaders, and then we also work in a traditional sales channel through brokers. 

How do you measure the correlation between engagement and actual health outcomes? What does spending 20 minutes on YuLife’s app mean for someone’s cortisol levels, for example?

We're showing about a 28% increase in daily steps by YuLife members before and after having the app. And we know the direct correlation between steps and your general health.

You’re launching soon in the US. What does that look like?

There's more of a focus on voluntary benefits in the US: The employee gets involved in purchasing either on a copay basis or purchasing additional benefits. So in the US, we’re going to use part of our app to let users purchase more products for themselves. Getting that relationship with the individual is much more important in the US, and we're focusing much more on that when it comes to the launch in the US.