We’re Not an Agency. We’re the Product Manufacturer.

Mark Scafaro spent most of his career in financial services — starting in banking, then years at American Express in a range of roles — before landing at a large insurance company that wanted to sell life insurance directly to consumers. That stint became the direct catalyst for Afficiency: he learned two things there. First, consumers genuinely want life insurance to be easy and digital, and the demand was real. Second, building that experience is genuinely hard for an established life insurer to pull off — layers of disparate legacy systems have to be manipulated to create even a single new product, and going direct to consumer creates real channel conflict with the traditional agents a carrier already depends on.

In Episode 76 of InsurTechTalk, Mark and I covered why Afficiency deliberately positions itself as a product manufacturer rather than a distribution agency, how the company solved the classic chicken-and-egg problem of needing both carriers and distributors before either will fully commit, and what actually happens — and doesn’t happen — when life insurance underwriting moves entirely online.

About Mark Scafaro

Mark Scafaro is CEO and co-founder of Afficiency, a life insurance product manufacturing and technology platform that designs digital-first life insurance products in partnership with carriers and reinsurers, then makes them available to any distributor — via API or a fully built white-label experience — without competing for distribution or customer acquisition itself. Before Afficiency, Mark worked in banking and spent many years at American Express, followed by a role at a large insurance company’s direct-to-consumer life insurance initiative, the experience that led him to found Afficiency.

The Mission: A Life Insurance Policy in Ten Minutes

Afficiency’s stated mission is reinventing the life insurance product and buying process to be fully digital and fast enough that an end user can walk away with a policy in their inbox in roughly ten minutes. Distributors — whether a startup, a digital agency, or an established agent who’s sold life insurance for decades — can put their own brand on that digital product and build their own user experience around it, making life insurance meaningfully more accessible to their own clients.

Manufacturer, Not Agency: Where Afficiency Actually Sits

Asked directly how Afficiency differs from the wave of digital life insurance agencies (he name-checked Haven and Ladder as examples), Mark drew a sharp structural line. Digital agencies build a consumer-facing brand, spend on customer acquisition, and earn insurance commission — a genuinely expensive game that’s only gotten more expensive as more participants have entered it. Afficiency doesn’t touch that side of the business at all. Instead, Afficiency partners with the risk takers — insurance companies and reinsurers — to design digital-first products, then makes those products available to any distributor, with Afficiency’s own economics built directly into the product rather than layered on top through separate distributor commission.

Distribution can happen two ways: a tech-savvy distributor can consume Afficiency’s APIs (covering quote, underwriting, application, decisioning, payment capture, and policy generation) and build its own experience on top, or Afficiency can build the full user experience itself for distributors who lack the cost, investment appetite, or in-house expertise to do so — a capability Afficiency added after discovering real distributor demand for it.

On risk itself: Afficiency doesn’t currently take on insurance risk. But Mark was direct that the company has a growing appetite to do so over time, tied to the confidence it’s building in its own underwriting — both the underwriting rules Afficiency builds directly and, just as important, choosing the right distribution partners in the first place, since getting good risk into the ecosystem starts well before any individual application is underwritten.

Beyond Term: Five Products Built, Six More Coming

Where Mark drew the sharpest distinction from the digital-agency wave: most of those companies are heavily invested in a single product category, term life insurance. Afficiency, because its focus is product manufacturing rather than distribution, has built five products and was building six more at the time of recording — expanding beyond term into more complex categories including wealth accumulation products, long-term care (a category he specifically flagged as facing real market demand), and disability income.

He also noted that new product categories don’t only serve online, direct-to-consumer buyers — agents have actively asked Afficiency for access to the same digital products, wanting an easier way to sell them to their own clients, reinforcing that Afficiency isn’t tied to any single delivery mechanism, brand, or distributor.

Solving the Chicken-and-Egg Problem

Asked how Afficiency got off the ground given that carriers want proof of distribution before committing and distributors want a finished product before committing, Mark’s answer was that there wasn’t a strict sequence — the two tracks were built in parallel from the start. Carriers needed confidence that Afficiency would actually bring them distribution before investing in building a new product together; distributors wanted to see a real product before committing their own channel. Afficiency’s solution was relationship-building on both sides simultaneously, introducing early carrier partners to prospective distributors and vice versa, and bringing both stakeholders toward the same finish line together rather than waiting for one side to fully commit first. Once that first use case existed, it created the traction and momentum needed to bring in subsequent partners.

Carrier Partners — and a Lesson From TIAA

Mark named three carrier partnerships directly: SBLI (Savings Bank Life Insurance, based in Massachusetts), Western & Southern Financial Group, and TIAA — the carrier behind Afficiency’s very first product. That TIAA relationship also produced a formative early lesson: roughly two months after the product launched, TIAA shut down its entire life insurance business. Mark’s takeaway was twofold — validation that Afficiency could actually design and ship a working product, paired with the concrete realization that Afficiency could never depend on a single carrier relationship and needed to diversify across multiple carrier partners going forward.

Reinsurers as Product Development Partners

Afficiency works closely with major reinsurers not just as eventual risk-takers but as active participants in new product design. When Afficiency is developing a new product, Mark described bringing reinsurance partners into the conversation early — sharing the proposed design, pricing, and underwriting approach, and gauging appetite to take on the risk — since life insurance carriers building something genuinely new often want a reinsurance risk partner alongside them. Mark connected this to a broader pattern he’s observed in the life insurance ecosystem: reinsurers have historically been some of the earliest and most willing capital behind insurtech innovation — pushing MGA and MGU models, funding new distribution approaches — often moving faster than carriers themselves toward growing the overall market rather than just defending existing share.

Instant Underwriting, Minus Two Things

Asked to explain how whole life insurance can actually be underwritten and sold entirely online, Mark was specific about what Afficiency does and doesn’t do. With consumer consent, Afficiency pulls underwriting evidence electronically and instantly — prescription history, motor vehicle records, risk scores, and Medical Insurance Bureau (MIB) data — and its underwriting engine interprets that data to make a decision in real time. The two things Afficiency deliberately doesn’t do: a physical blood draw, and pulling full medical records directly from a doctor’s office — both processes that inherently take time no amount of software can compress.

He noted the pricing and risk gap between this kind of instant underwriting and traditional, fully underwritten policies has been narrowing steadily as more of the underlying data sources go digital and instant themselves, and that Afficiency’s underwriting engine is built to continuously bring in new third-party data sources as they become available — citing prescription-history and risk-score vendors it already integrates with as examples. On medical records and EHR data specifically, Mark was candid that Afficiency isn’t there yet, but expects specialized third-party AI companies focused specifically on that narrow problem to solve it — at which point that becomes just another data input into Afficiency’s underwriting engine, rather than something Afficiency needs to build itself. Afficiency also uses underwriting-adjacent data upfront to help distributors score and filter leads before running full underwriting, improving both the risk quality Afficiency attracts and the efficiency of its distributors’ own sales conversations.

Growth: Profitable by Year-End, Hiring Aggressively

Mark described Afficiency’s business model as an efficient one, on track to reach operational profitability by the end of the year at the time of recording, with a full pipeline of both new distributors and new products in development. The company had just spent four months hiring aggressively, having recently filled both a Chief Financial Officer and a Chief Revenue Officer role, and was continuing to build out its technology and data science teams. The area he flagged as needing the most additional investment going forward was marketing — not consumer marketing, since Afficiency doesn’t sell direct to end users, but B2B marketing aimed at getting the word out to prospective distribution partners about what the company does.

Recommendation: Talk Less, Listen More

Asked for a closing recommendation, Mark offered a life hack rather than a book: talk less and listen more. He acknowledged the tension for a founder, who has to constantly sell a vision and an idea — but reflected that in a solutions business like Afficiency’s, genuinely listening surfaces far more useful insight than talking, and it’s a lesson he said he appreciates more with time and experience.

Key Takeaways

• Afficiency positions itself explicitly as a life insurance product manufacturer, not a distribution agency — it doesn’t compete for customer acquisition or earn distribution commission, building its economics directly into the product instead
• The company offers both a pure API integration for tech-savvy distributors and a fully built white-label user experience for distributors who lack the resources or expertise to build their own — a capability added after discovering real market demand for it
• Unlike much of the digital life insurance wave that concentrated on term products, Afficiency has built five products and was developing six more, expanding into wealth accumulation, long-term care, and disability income
• The chicken-and-egg problem between needing carrier confidence and distributor proof was solved by building both sets of relationships in parallel from day one, rather than waiting for either side to fully commit first
• A formative early lesson came from TIAA — Afficiency’s first carrier partner — shutting down its life insurance business roughly two months after launching Afficiency’s first product, reinforcing the need for multiple carrier relationships rather than dependence on one
• Reinsurers function as active product-design partners for Afficiency, not just downstream risk-takers, and have historically been some of the earliest capital sources pushing MGA/MGU-style insurtech innovation in the life insurance space
• Instant digital underwriting at Afficiency covers prescription history, motor vehicle records, risk scores, and MIB data — everything except a physical blood draw and full medical records, with that remaining gap expected to close further as more specialized data and AI vendors emerge