Announcing White Swan for Partners - Our Plug-and-Play Brokerage Platform

Leveraging our success of serving users directly, we're launching White Swan for Partners, a platform which empowers financial advisors, fintechs, and insurance providers to easily plug into our platform to offer their clients powerful solutions through an easy-to-use digital platform and brokerage that provides best-interest access to the universe of life insurance solutions.

Important: we've introduced several new functionalities to the platform since this article was written. For the most up-to-date documentation on our platform, refer to our knowledge base.

In this article, we will cover:

Why we built our partner platform
The benefits our partner platform brings
How to get started and use the platform
The future for the platform

Why We Built White Swan for Partners

Life insurance solutions, when appropriately selected and designed, can be very powerful financial tools for both accumulation and protection purposes, which is why it has since long been a common component of a solid financial plan for individuals and businesses.

Accessing the industry’s products, however, has been very complicated, opaque, and resource intensive.

While there is great technology to provide easy access to term life insurance, these products only scratch the surface of what life insurance products can do, and is not the right choice for everyone, especially considering the fact that 99% of term life insurance policies never pay out a death benefit.

If you’re looking for permanent products with accumulation potential, there are only a handful of providers which offers them through a digital experience - however, the majority of these providers only work with one or a few insurers, which means that they can’t match each client with the optimal solution for their needs, as they don’t provide independent advice.

To provide clients with the highest quality solutions, it is important to work with an independent brokerage that can compare potential solutions across many carriers and product types, as the optimal solution will differ depending on individual circumstances.

Before White Swan for Partners, however, working with an independent brokerage like this implied working with a physical sales process that was complicated, opaque, and time-consuming for everyone involved.

With White Swan for Partners, we’re setting things straight with a simple and transparent plug-and-play platform that allows any business to easily offer any type of life insurance, without the complications of establishing resource-intensive infrastructure, relationships, and technology.

The Benefits of White Swan for Partners

Using White Swan for Partners to offer life insurance solutions brings many benefits to you, your business, and your client.

Benefit 1: Access any life insurance policy type

White Swan is unique in the sense that it provides access to any type of life insurance policy, including policies such as variable universal life, indexed universal life, whole life, private placement life, term life, and guaranteed universal life.

These policy types allow for more than just death benefit protection, and some feature a cash value which can act as an alternative accumulation vehicle with unmatchable tax and asset protection advantages.

By featuring the entire universe of these solutions, White Swan can be leveraged to offer solutions which can have its cash value allocated to a wide range of accounts and funds, with varying degrees of risk and reward.

With policies such as whole life and indexed universal life, your clients can access minimum guaranteed growth or protection against loss with upside growth tied to stock indexes.

With policies such as variable universal life and private placement life, your clients can access a wide range of funds managed by top money managers, providing exposure to a variety of asset classes, investment strategies, and geographies.

Benefit 2: Independent, data-driven access to top insurance carriers

We work independently with more than 25 of the most competitive life insurance carriers.

Each time a plan is requested through White Swan, we use a data-driven approach assisted by industry experts to carefully select the optimal plan amongst our insurers.

Having access to many top carriers in one place means that we can always ensure that the solution your clients are getting is the best possible solution in the market, and can provide them with the most amount of value for their money.

As we offer a wide range of products, we don’t have any limits on coverage amounts, and can handle any larger or more complex case.

Furthermore, insurers underwrite risk differently - for example, some insurers will deny any applicant who consumes marijuana, while others won’t - and by working through White Swan, you can ensure that your clients get a solution that is optimal for their circumstances.

Benefit 3: Fully digital, supported by industry experts

White Swan for partners offers a fully digital buying experience for your clients coupled with an separate interface for partners which allows you to easily customize your clients experience, track their progress, and manage earnings from using White Swan for partners.

Behind the scenes, our technology is supported by industry experts who provide a personal touch throughout the experience and can assist with any questions or advanced planning needs.

The platform is easy to use on any device, transparent, and completely free to use for your whole company.

In the next sections, we will get into the details on how to get started and use the platform.

Getting Started with White Swan for Partners

To get started, you can sign up for a new account either by using your Google account or with a password.

If your company doesn’t already have an account with White Swan, you will initially provide some simple information on yourself and your company.

At the end of the onboarding process, you can invite other users on your company to your company account.

White Swan for Partners is free to use for an unlimited number of team members.

With permission levels, you can easily control who can access and change general company data in your account.

Setting Up Earnings

If you want to, you can activate earnings for your company account, which can be paid as a fixed referral fee or a percentage of our total compensation on your clients cases.

To activate earnings as a percentage of our total compensation, someone at your company needs to hold a license as a life insurance producer in the state(s) in which your clients are residents.

To be eligible to receive any earnings for variable products, you also need to hold securities licenses.

To finalize activating earnings for your account, you need to set up a call with our partners team.

On this call, we will introduce ourselves, answer any questions you may have, and find an arrangement that is mutually beneficial for our earnings share agreement.

After the call, we will send you an agreement for e-signature, and once it's signed, we’ll send you a link which allows you to securely provide us with your payment information so that you can start paying you earnings from using White Swan for Partners.

Using the Platform

Now, you’re set up and ready to start using White Swan for partners, and can access your account any time by logging in through our website.

Whenever you log in, you will find your dashboard, where you can easily start new cases through re-usable links or custom cases, and see your clients current cases.

Re-Usable Links

Your account comes with two types of re-usable links which you can use on your website or send to clients.

Any time you send a client any of these links, their cases will be associated with your account.

Your general company link can be accessed by everyone in your company, but only edited by admins, and can be used to provide a company branded experience to your clients.

Your personal link can be individualized to fit your personal style, and any clients referred through this link will be automatically assigned to you.

With both your company link as well as your personal link, any element of the welcome page can be customized, including image, headline, and text. If you don’t want a custom welcome page for your re-usable link, you can configure that too.

Additionally, for any re-usable link you’re able to customize communication preferences for cases that go through these links.

This includes selecting if we should communicate with you, your client, or both on the cases, and if we should follow up with your clients after we send plans.

The ability to customize the way we interact with your clients helps you maintain as much involvement and control over your client relationships as you wish.

You can also add custom re-direct links to your clients experience - which is an opportunity to guide your clients back to your website after they have submitted a plan request.

This could for example be used to cross-promote complementary products, and can be easily configured in your page settings - just add your own URL in the "Custom URL Redirect".

Custom Cases

Sometimes, you may want to start a case with different settings than those in your re-usable links. In that case, you can start a new custom case, which is available through your dashboard.

When you do a custom case, you can decide whether you want to enter the information yourself, or whether you want us to send a link to your client and let them complete the request themselves.

If you decide to send a link to your client to complete themselves, you can choose if you want to send it by email only or also send it by text, and you can customize the message.

Settings

On the general settings page, accessible through the drop down menu in the top right corner, you can change your personal or business information as well as manage users and earnings information.

Under company settings, you have the option to choose whether you want your clients experience to have your company name co-branded in the header.

Additionally, you can control the policy types which are allowed for your clients. It is generally not recommended to disable any policy types, as it might not be in the best-interest of your clients, but if you do want to only offer certain policies, you can do that here.

Your Clients Buying Experience

Whether your client starts through a re-usable link or through a custom case, they get to experience a fully digital buying experience for any life insurance solution, which we will learn more about in this section.

Recommendation Engine

In the first phase of the experience, your clients can either pick a specific policy type from our selection, or, they could get recommended a policy type based on a few simple questions.

As a basis for our recommendation, we take your clients goals into consideration.

Throughout the experience, simple texts and tooltips help educate the user about the different aspects of life insurance.

Next, we ask a few questions about their accumulation preferences, which relates to cash value policies, and includes considerations such as risk tolerance and desired exposure.

Secondly, we ask a few questions about their protection preferences, which relates to the death benefit of life insurance policies, including considerations such as guarantees and coverage variability.

Lastly, we ask a few questions surrounding the third key component in life solutions, the premium, including considerations such as premium flexibility and guarantees.

Policy Recommendations and Sample Policies

Once the questions are answered, our recommendation engine provides a recommended policy type for your client. It is also possible for your client to see why we made the recommendation, and if there are any desired traits that the recommended policy does not feature.

On this page, your client also gets to see how a sample plan would perform given different amounts of premium or different amounts of coverage, depending on whether the client is protection or accumulation focused.

This includes values such as future cash value and income, which can be planned to be distributed from the policy at any age.

It also includes protection values such as initial and future death benefit, as well as more advanced performance metrics such as projected internal rates of returns (IRRs).

Personal Plan Requests

Once your client has understood the policy type and the results it can achieve, they can request a personal plan.

This process starts with a few preliminary underwriting questions related to the insured person, including considerations such as place of residence, nicotine use, and marijuana use (if they live in a state where at least medical use is legal).

By collecting this information, we're able to identify the carriers which gives the most favorable treatment to your clients profile.

In the next section, we ask them a questions on their policy needs, including considerations such as coverage amount, premium budget, payment schedule, and desired paid up period.

For eligible cases, your clients are offered the option to opt for either fully underwritten products, which might take up to 90 days to be issued, or opt for expedited products, which can be issued in as little as one business day, but may come at a 1-3% additional cost.

At this point, we have the basics we need to find an plan for your client. If they want to, however, they can go deeper and customize more aspects of their personal plan.

This includes planning for using the plan for income in the future, including considerations such as age and length of distributions.

For variable universal life and indexed universal life plans, it also includes the ability to customize the accounts which the cash value of the policy is allocated to.

Additionally, your clients can customize riders for their plans, which can provide additional benefits and functionality.

Finally, your clients can customize aspects around the funding of their policy, such as making an initial one-time deposit at the onset of the plan or leaving room for funding the plan with higher premiums in the future.

Personal Plans

Once a request has been completed, our industry experts will carefully compare alternatives from America’s top carriers to find the optimal solution for your clients needs.

Within one business day, we will send a link out to your personal plan via email and text, as per your communication preferences.

We take you and your clients data security seriously, and any information beyond this point requires your client to be authenticated, either by setting up an account with us, or by authenticating via a 2 factor authentication code sent to their phone or email.

While we do provide the traditional documents related to life insurance proposals, such as a an illustration and a prospectus, our personal plans are presented similarly to the sample plans, in a very easy to understand way that visualizes the key components of the policy.

Just like the sample plan, your clients can see how the cash value is expected to grow over time, what income they could expect, and what protection values they can expect.

Additionally, they can see which riders and accounts are included in the plan, along with details about each account and rider.

If the client has any questions for the plan, they can schedule a call with the assigned client success manager for the case.

The client can also request plan alternatives by submitting a change request, where they can change their initial answers or provide comments on what they are looking for.

Applications

Once the client is ready to apply for the policy, they can do so either online, or by scheduling a call with their client success manager.

The online applications are collected using HIPAA and SOC2 compliant forms, which collect more in-depth information that can be used to submit applications to one or several carriers.

Once applications are submitted, underwriting times vary for different products and solutions.

We offer certain expedited products which can go from application to issuance within one business day - but to ensure that we can always provide the most competitive, best-interest oriented alternatives, we also do offer fully underwritten products which may take 90+ days from application to offer.

During the underwriting, the client success manager helps the client get the best possible rating and collects any information required.

Tracking Cases

As a partner, you can track cases you’ve referred through your re-usable links or custom cases.

Through your dashboard, you can access all your clients current cases, which are searchable by name or filterable by associated user in your company.

If you open any case, you can see the current status of the plan, schedule a call with the client success manager of the case, see any details related to the case, or change communication preferences for the case.

Tracking Earnings

Once your clients have been issued policies, you can start earning a revenue from White Swan with Partners if you’ve activated earning for your account.

Through the drop-down menu in the top right corner, you can access your earnings page, which contain information about your earnings over time.

This includes an earnings log, which provides insight into exactly which cases you are earning from, and what amounts are earned.

It also allows you to see earnings per user on your company account, which can help you allocate rewards amongst your team.

Earnings for cases are generally paid out as we receive commissions from insurers, which could be monthly for up to 12 months.

Through your earnings log, you can always see what you’re currently owed, as well as crediting invoices for any payments we issue to your company account.

The Future of White Swan for Partners

While White Swan for Partners already help provide an unmatchable experience for allowing your clients to access high quality life insurance solutions, this is just the beginning.

Our nimble product team is constantly optimizing the platform and is eager to continue improving the platform with feedback from partners.

Any time you need help with the platform or have suggestions for additional features or improvements, we welcome you to get in touch with us.

With that said, we have several exciting features in the roadmap for the platform, including:

Fully automated and instant custom plans
More advanced embed options
APIs to allow our core services to be integrated into other software solutions
Further product availability such as long-term-care and more expedited products
Allowing agents to run their own plan designs, applications and underwriting
In-force policy management portal

Conclusion

White Swan for Partners can help you provide your clients with digital access to the entire universe of life insurance solutions with the highest best-interest standards and a high degree of customizability.