How Modern Life Is Rebuilding Life Insurance From the Ground Up
by TradedShare
National
VC
Life insurance is one of the largest financial products in the United States, yet for most people it feels outdated, slow, and painful. Applications take months. Advisors juggle endless paperwork. Clients get stuck with medical exams, phone interviews, and long underwriting delays.
Modern Life founder Michael Konialian saw this firsthand when he tried to buy life insurance himself. Even as a young and healthy buyer, the experience was confusing, invasive, and shockingly slow.
That moment became the start of a company focused on transforming a 175 billion dollar market that still runs on legacy systems and paper heavy workflows.
A Personal Frustration That Sparked a Big Idea
Michael’s own life insurance journey was the turning point.
What should have been a simple process became a maze of financial documents, medical procedures, and bureaucratic steps.
He dealt with:
- Pages of dense financial statements
- A long medical exam
- Needles and lab work
- Over an hour of phone interviews
- Months of waiting
- Multiple forms and disclosures sent in pieces
This was the experience for someone young, healthy, and relatively low risk. It made one thing obvious.
Life insurance was overdue for a modern, digital transformation.
A Founder with Deep Industry Experience
Before starting Modern Life, Michael spent more than a decade at the forefront of insurance innovation.
His background includes:
- Leadership at CoverWallet, one of the first major fintech disruptors in property and casualty insurance
- Scaling the agent business and contributing to CoverWallet’s nine figure exit to Aon
- Leading commercial partnerships at scale
- Prior experience at McKinsey helping large financial firms modernize insurance, banking, and wealth management operations
This combination of fintech, advisory, and deep insurance domain knowledge helped him see what most founders missed.
The biggest opportunity in life insurance was not direct to consumer. It was empowering advisors, who still drive 90 percent of the industry’s distribution.
Why Modern Life Focuses on Advisors, Not Consumers
At the time Modern Life launched, many venture backed startups were following the Lemonade playbook. Direct to consumer. Fully vertical. Purely transactional.
Michael and his team went the opposite direction.
They focused on insurance advisors for two reasons:
- The advisor market is much larger.
Life insurance is a 175 billion dollar space. Ninety percent flows through advisors. - Life insurance is complex.
Clients often have unique tax situations, financial plans, health histories, and long term needs that require guidance.
According to Michael:
People have complex financial needs and different health histories. There are lots of products in the market. Advisors play a crucial role in matching all of that.
By helping advisors deliver better advice, Modern Life aims to transform the system from the inside out.
Explaining Modern Life in Simple Terms
For someone who does not know insurance, Michael describes Modern Life this way:
We empower advisors to serve their clients more easily, more powerfully, and more efficiently.
The platform does three core things:
- Delivers high quality advice
It uses data to help advisors match clients to the right products across many carriers. - Creates a modern client experience
No needles if possible. No six month waits. No long medical interviews. A single, digital workflow. - Enables advisors to scale
Advisors can manage twice as many clients because the system removes manual work and automates slow processes.
A Fully Digital, Advisor First Platform
Modern Life built its entire journey on digital rails.
This allows them to:
- Consolidate many carriers into one unified experience
- Eliminate stacks of paperwork
- Provide end to end visibility into every step
- Bring AI into quoting, underwriting, and application workflows
- Deliver a single login instead of juggling many systems
Michael calls the legacy process “a mortgage with needles.” Modern Life replaces it with a clear, simple digital flow that advisors and clients prefer immediately.
How AI Strengthens the Advisor Workflow
Because Modern Life built the entire system from scratch, AI can be woven through every step of the advisor experience.
AI helps with:
- Case design and financial optimization
- Matching products to complex client profiles
- Pre underwriting and risk assessment
- Automating repetitive tasks
- Speeding up application processes
Advisors can work smarter, move faster, and spend more time guiding clients rather than managing paperwork.
Transforming the End Client Experience
The improvements do not stop with advisors.
For the client:
- No one wants to fill out endless forms
- No one wants months of waiting
- No one wants medical needles unless absolutely necessary
The digital experience is simpler, faster, and far less intrusive.
Michael said the impact is immediate:
Every day we hear from advisors that this is not like anything else in the market. It feels modern, consolidated, and streamlined.
The Hard Part: Integrating with Legacy Infrastructure
Modern Life is modern. The rest of the industry is not.
Many carriers still run on older systems, which creates integration challenges.
Michael explained the approach:
- Connect directly to carriers when possible
- Build Modern Life’s own user experience on top
- Control the full advisor journey
- Maintain a polished, consistent, digital first feel
This hybrid approach allows Modern Life to innovate even while working with slower partners.
However, it also means building a massive amount of the infrastructure themselves, including:
- Quoting
- Underwriting
- Application workflows
- Digital rails for submission and delivery
The complexity is high, but so is the opportunity.
The Strategic Bet That Changed Everything
Michael shared the single decision that mattered most.
Choosing to build for advisors from day one.
At a time when direct to consumer looked like the trendy model, the Modern Life team chose the bigger, harder, and more impactful path.
This decision gave them:
- A larger market
- Stronger value alignment
- A clearer competitive edge
- A way to digitize the heart of the industry rather than its edges
Today, that decision looks prescient. The advisor channel has become the center of innovation.
A Larger and More Complex Market Than Expected
Michael admitted one surprise.
He thought life insurance would be similar to other insurance lines he had worked on. It was not.
Life insurance turned out to be:
- More complex
- More regulated
- More medically detailed
- More financially intricate
This made the opportunity larger but also harder. It created more barriers to entry and more room for Modern Life to lead.
Competition and Modern Life’s Advantage
Most competitors are traditional distributors with fragmented tools and manual workflows.
Modern Life stands out through:
- A single digital platform
- AI enhanced tools
- One login for the entire process
- End to end digital rails
- A modern user experience for advisors and clients
Technology is the differentiator. Advisors feel the difference immediately.
Looking Ahead: A More Modern Insurance Industry
Michael’s long term vision is clear.
Modern Life wants to create a future where:
- Advisors work smarter with AI
- Each advisor can support far more clients
- Life insurance becomes digital, fast, and frustration free
- Clients no longer deal with needles, long waits, or paperwork
- The entire ecosystem becomes simpler and more transparent
It is a vision of an industry that finally matches modern expectations.
Modern Life is early in this transformation, but its approach resonates with both advisors and clients. By rebuilding life insurance from the ground up, the company is shaping a more efficient, scalable, and customer friendly future.
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