SBLI

SBLI is a 118-year-old Massachusetts mutual life insurer, and for eight and a half years I was the developer who built and ran everything a customer touches online: the quoting engine at sbli.com, the fully digital application at apply.sbli.com, the lead pipeline into their CRM, and the analytics that told marketing which dollars actually turned into issued policies.

Key Takeaways

  • Built the pricing platform an insurer runs on: actuarial rate spreadsheets imported directly into a custom quoting engine, so new rates publish in minutes with no deploy and no developer.
  • Delivered a complete digital application at apply.sbli.com, an Angular application over a WordPress API layer, integrated with the insurer's policy systems and CRM lead service.
  • Standardized measurement for a 90-day sales cycle: 37 documented events through Segment into BigQuery, with underwriting outcomes fed back to the ad platforms so campaigns optimized on policies issued, not clicks.
  • Ran partner lead intake as production infrastructure, with webhook endpoints validating, recording and submitting every partner lead and writing the CRM's response back for auditability.
  • Made the exit a deliverable: a twelve-document handover repository and live knowledge-transfer sessions with the in-house team that took over.

Organization

The Savings Bank Mutual Life Insurance Company of Massachusetts was chartered more than a century ago out of Louis Brandeis's savings-bank life insurance movement, built on the premise that working families should be able to buy life insurance without paying an agent's commission. It is direct-to-consumer by design, which makes the website the storefront, not collateral.

Challenge

A life insurance sale is a multi-week process: an anonymous quote, a medical prescreen, a digital or phone application, underwriting, and a policy issued 30 to 90 days later. Pricing had to move from actuarial spreadsheets to the website reliably, the application had to hand off cleanly to policy systems, and marketing needed attribution that survives the whole cycle.

Solution

  • A custom plugin owning pricing outright: a rate table rebuilt from the actuarial workbook on import, covering every issue age, term, rate class and coverage band from $100,000 to $5,000,000.
  • Instant quoting on the front end, plus an affordability calculator and an embeddable partner quote widget.
  • The Angular application, 31 components and 17 services, with field-level components carrying their own validation, served by a WordPress backend acting purely as an API layer.
  • A resilient SOAP integration into the CRM lead service, with token caching and timeout handling built for how enterprise endpoints actually behave.
  • Segment as the customer data platform with events named on the Object Action Framework and properties mapped to insurance data standards, warehoused in BigQuery.
  • A Node microservice returning offline underwriting outcomes to Facebook, Google and Bing.

Results

  • Conversions up 362% on full-funnel measurement including offline outcomes.
  • Customer acquisition cost down roughly 25%; wasted spend on leads that never underwrite down roughly 30%.
  • Attribution covering 90+ days from ad click to issued policy.
  • New actuarial rates live in minutes via spreadsheet import.
  • Vendor-to-vendor reporting variance under 5% on one shared event specification.