Sammy Rubin has been on a journey of enlightenment – one that has brought him full circle.
The former Vitality chief executive is embarking on a venture to bring a new life insurer to the market, which he claims will be different from those that already exist.
Yulife, which will launch later this year, will provide life insurance and wellbeing tools to businesses and consumers.
All Yulife policies will be underwritten by AIG Life Limited, the UK life insurance arm of insurance giant AIG.
Mr Rubin said that when it comes to coupling wellbeing and life insurance there is a gap in the market, which very few businesses are filling.
Additionally, he said the life sector focuses heavily on death and claims, and not enough on how to encourage people to live a better lifestyle.
He said: “For life insurance to resonate with people I feel it needs to go back to its roots and become the vehicle for leading a better life.
“Yulife is all about the now and the present and how can we help you lead your best life now, not in 20 or 30 years’ time.”
Changing customer demands
This model may sound similar to the Vitality business that Mr Rubin oversaw between 2006 and 2007, but he is keen to point out that one of the key differences with Yulife is that it will be a direct model. This is to take advantage of changing customer demands.
Mr Rubin said that with the growth of the digital economy people are now more adept at buying goods with their phones, using their handsets as a gateway for different types of goods and services. There has also been an increased focus on digital wellbeing, which stems from a belief that technology should improve life, not distract from it. He added: “There is a real opportunity to harness all the best digital apps out there. There is a whole ecosystem of apps, wearable devices and all these apps people are using to collect data.
“We want to build a new life insurance model taking in data from different sources, and not only creating a dynamic risk model but creating a rewards model to engage in those behaviours.”
Yulife also wants to capitalise on the changing ways people are looking to get fit and stay healthy – as communities of fitness enthusiasts gradually move outside the four walls of a gym.
“People do not need to go to gyms to work out anymore. They can watch high-intensity interval training videos,” Mr Rubin said.
“Your gym is in your phone and you have parks and your feet. We will be encouraging people to meditate and do other fun things. We are playing to a different economy. There is also the growth of millennials who are looking for something to engage with. We are on a mission and want to learn a lot of things along the way.”
Another big area the company will be targeting is businesses. According to Mr Rubin, business leaders are looking to inspire their staff to be their best selves, and that is an area Yulife wants to penetrate.
He added: “We feel businesses and communities of people are essentially opportunities.
“Over 90 per cent of businesses do not offer life insurance to their staff. The very large corporates do, but there are many medium-sized businesses where they are underserved and we feel that is a market we can penetrate.”
Mr Rubin is drawn to new challenges and said he has always loved the idea of a business that combines wellness with financial services.
For the past decade, since leaving Vitality in 2007, he has learnt other skills and spent time in the tech sector, investing in platforms and looking at different start-ups.
He said one of the main reasons he left Vitality was because both he and the team realised his DNA was more entrepreneurial than employee. During his time away he has explored working with existing life insurance players who approached him about launching a combined wellness and life insurance model, but he eventually decided he wanted to do something more independent.
His start-up mentality was born a long time ago: as far back as his student days at Imperial College when he built a trading platform to trade endowments.
Co-founded with his late father, within five years the company Policy Portfolio was floated on the London Stock Exchange (LSE), making Mr Rubin, at 26, the youngest director of a listed company on the LSE.
The road to wellness
After the company was sold in 1997, and by then feeling burnt out, Mr Rubin, in his own words, went on a “journey to discover tools for my own wellbeing”.
This trip took him to a wellness centre in Arizona, which his wife ran, where people came from all over the world with different conditions. The centre helped people change their diets, which he said had an enormous impact on their lifestyle.
This experience inspired him and he became fascinated with the world of wellbeing, wellness, and changing one’s lifestyle through diet and meditation. Coming back to the UK he was approached by Discovery, parent company of PruProtect, to become chief executive of the subsidiary. PruProtect was later rebranded as Vitality Life. Looking ahead to his next venture Yulife, Mr Rubin said he wants to build a life insurance company that will inspire people to live their best lives, a model that will be heavily driven by a start-up culture.
Ima Jackson-Obot is a features writer at Financial Adviser
