MassMutual to shut down insurtech subsidiary as Haven brand fades

Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Co. is folding its insurtech subsidiary Haven Technologies at the end of the year—the latest in a series of cuts to the insurance giant’s tech-focused spin-offs.

Haven Technologies and roughly half of its 123 employees will be absorbed into the larger corporation beginning in 2025, MassMutual confirmed. The remaining 63 workers will either lose their jobs or get the option to stay on with MassMutual, according to a notice filed earlier this month with the New York Department of Labor.

“Over time, it has become clear that the market for and economic structure of this standalone Software as a Service (SaaS) business isn’t viable,” a MassMutual spokesperson said.

While MassMutual’s bread-and-butter life insurance and annuities business has grown steadily in recent years, the Massachusetts-based insurer has now closed three subsidiaries in less than 12 months, highlighting the difficulties major insurance companies have faced in expanding to different business areas.

Haven Technologies, which developed and sold insurtech platforms to other carriers, grew out of fellow MassMutual subsidiary Haven Life in 2021. A blog post announcing the new business described it as a way to bring the technology powering Haven Life to other insurers in an industry that was too reliant on outdated software.

Just three years later, neither Haven brand is still standing.

Profitable despite changing dynamics

Last November, MassMutual told InsuranceNewsNet that it would “wind down” Haven Life, a direct-to-consumer term life carrier that offered online sign-up, citing “lack of consumer adoption" and "high costs associated with customer acquisition.”

Haven Technologies has gone through its own turmoil across three years in business. The company’s first CEO, Yaron Ben-Zvi, who also founded Haven Life, departed in 2022. The insurtech brand then slashed more than 65% of its workforce last summer, per a separate New York Department of Labor filing.

Most recently, MassMutual dissolved its consumer-facing risk score venture LifeScore Labs, as reported last month by Coverager.

Jamie Tucker, senior director of North American Insurance Ratings at Fitch Global Ratings, does not think the string of closures will be a long-term blow to MassMutual. “We view them as one of the strongest insurers in the industry,” Tucker said.

MassMutual reported nearly $38 billion in revenue in 2023, up 10.5% from the year prior, and paid out a record $2.2 billion in dividends to its policyholders. The Fortune 500 company maintains AA+ financial strength ratings and stable outlooks from Fitch and S&P.

Tucker highlighted the 2021 acquisition of annuities provider Great American Life Insurance Co.—now MassMutual Ascend—as a key driver of the company’s uptick in annuities sales. This growth path mirrors trends in the industry as a whole, Tucker said, with elevated interest rates helping to drive record annuities volume.

D2C not going well

Direct-to-consumer life insurance offerings like Haven Life haven’t fared nearly as well, however, even for large companies like MassMutual that are able to throw resources behind high-tech acquisitions and spin-offs.

In the highest profile case of a direct-to-consumer venture gone awry, Prudential shuttered digital insurance platform Assurance IQ and laid off most of the subsidiary’s roughly 1,000 employees earlier this year.

Still, the Fitch team believes MassMutual has leveraged the digital infrastructure from the Haven offshoots to improve its core business, a feeling echoed by MassMutual itself.

Shutting down Haven Technologies as a standalone B2B subsidiary will allow “even more focus on the technology elements that support MassMutual’s strategy,” the spokesperson said.

The company will continue to support its venture capital firm MassMutual Ventures, which provides “insights into new trends, technologies and solutions that are being developed throughout the world,” the spokesperson added.

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Nate Wolf is a graduate student at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute concentrating in Business & Economics Reporting. He mainly covers labor, the workplace, and the financial services industry. You can find him on X at @_NateWolf.