The goodness of mutuality — With Paul Quaranto

In a world that often believes bigger is better, a 133-year-old mutual insurer is focused on serving Americans of more modest means. Boston Mutual was founded with the purpose of providing working Americans with financial peace of mind in their time of need. The company provides life, accident and related insurance products through the workplace as well as in the individual market.

Paul Quaranto led Boston Mutual from 2012 to 2025 and currently serves as chair of Boston Mutual’s board of directors and of the board of Life Insurance Company of Boston & New York. He also served as chairman of the American Council of Life Insurers from 2023 to 2024, helping raise awareness of the life insurance industry among lawmakers, policymakers and consumers.

In this interview with publisher Paul Feldman, Quaranto describes the philosophy that has led Boston Mutual through more than a century of serving its policyholders, as well as the company’s efforts in using artificial intelligence and data analytics to improve the customer experience.

PAUL FELDMAN: How did you get into this industry?

PAUL QUARANTO: It’s a simple story. My wife and I were engaged to be married — it was almost 45 years ago — and it was my senior year of college. Her father suggested that I should have a job before I married his daughter. I interviewed on campus for a company called Paul Revere — it later became part of the Unum companies — and I had the opportunity to take a job there as a group insurance underwriter.

That’s where I began. It began by default. It’s amazing to think that 45 years later, I’ve been blessed to have the opportunity to work in this industry and to grow into a leadership role that I never thought could happen. It has been a fantastic run, and I’m very humbled and honored to have had this happen.

One of the problems we have as an industry is that people don’t look at this industry as giving you real professional opportunity. We developed an intern program here, and I try to remind the interns that this industry has evolved. It’s not only about actuaries and accountants and attorneys anymore. Everything they find in other walks of life — whether it’s technology, project management, public relations, investments — exists in this world. We need to compete in all those areas.

This industry provides incredible opportunities for younger people. I believe it’s an industry that serves what many younger people want, which is balance in their life, purpose and mission, the feeling that they’re not only growing professionally but they’re meeting some of their personal goals of serving in a meaningful role and giving something back. I think this industry can provide that for people. We need to do a better job of telling that story.

FELDMAN: What can we do as industry tell our story better?

QUARANTO: A year ago, I was chosen to chair the American Council of Life Insurers. For a company like Boston Mutual, to be selected to do that was truly an honor.

I think it was a recognition by companies of all sizes of a company of our size — which is small to midsized by industry standards and serves in a unique space. More than 130 years ago, Boston Mutual’s first president said we want to be a progressive life insurance company serving the needs of working families who, at that time, didn’t have the opportunity to secure any level of financial security. Fast-forward to today and we’re still that company. I think it has been a wonderful opportunity to be the face of an organization saying we serve people in all walks of life and then having the opportunity to say we need to tell that story better so that people can understand what we do is affordable. We need to make things simpler.

I think this industry is a noble one. It is a noble industry doing good things, yet nobody knows that. That was my pitch when I served my year at ACLI: Let’s tell our story better.

We must do a better job of saying we serve people from all walks of life. We need to make life insurance simpler and understandable. It’s a complex business, and what goes on behind the curtain can be complex, but we must do a better job of telling that story. I hear every day how a $5,000 or $10,000 or $15,000 life insurance policy is saving a family. Think about that. We don’t live in that world every day, but most people in this country live in that world. That’s pretty powerful stuff.

FELDMAN: Boston Mutual serves the lower-to-middle-income market. It’s such an underserved market. What made you choose that market?

QUARANTO: Part of Boston Mutual’s metamorphosis was we started by selling life insurance policies at the kitchen table, and today, we sell them at the cafeteria table. We’re using the workplace as a leverage point, and I think a lot of companies are looking at that. When you get to the markets we serve, when you think about access and you think about payroll deductions, there is a means that’s more efficient in terms of selling the products. Our market for group products is companies with five all the way up to 50 employees.

We sell some group life chassis products, but we still sell a traditional individual whole life product that is built to serve those markets. That’s a policy that the employee owns. Regardless of whether they stay with that employer, they have the opportunity to maintain the policy forever. Part of what we want to represent through the agents who sell our product is that if an employer is concerned about their people and they want to give them products that can provide a level of protection they believe they need, then let’s have a conversation. Because for us, it’s about giving employees that level of security and a product they can own and carry forward.

If an employer is just looking to put a menu of products out there and leverage an insurance buy with a technology platform that can also serve as an HR system for them, and all they want are products that will plug into that, and they don’t care if only 3% of the group signs up, that’s not who we want to talk to. I want to talk to Paul who’s got 30 employees, who knows most of them and is concerned that if the worst were to happen, he knows the family and doesn’t want to be in a position where he hasn’t done anything.

Now he can give them that policy — life, accident, critical illness, whatever — and they have a level of protection. If someone has that sort of sense as an employer, then that’s someone we want to talk to. There’s something that’s a value we can bring to them. We don’t want to be a commodity. We want to be a value-add for a family.

FELDMAN: Boston Mutual is a 133-year-old mutual company.  Tell us what that means to you.

QUARANTO: At Boston Mutual, we talk about the goodness of mutuality. We’re owned by policyholders for the benefit of our policyholders. We’re not trying to appease quarterly market returns versus long-term promises to clients. I think it allows us to live everything in terms of our brand and the value that we want to bring to the table. It affords us this opportunity to say we want to serve our customers. We know who they are. We want to serve the people who sell us. We want to serve our employees.

We want to serve our communities. We’ve developed the Making an Impact program. We’ve been recognized for seven years as one of the most charitable organizations in Massachusetts. There is a bigger picture, a greater good that exists, and as a mutual company we can touch all those, but at the end of the day, we must be successful. We must grow our business and do it the right way but align all those pieces as well.

FELDMAN: What’s new and exciting at your company?

QUARANTO: I think it’s a combination of what is new and exciting and what isn’t new and exciting. I believe in the power of our story. I was the seventh president of Boston Mutual. We are in the middle of a leadership transition, and I am now the chairman and CEO. We have named a new president who will transition into the role.

John Wheeler, our company’s first president, said our mission was to provide working Americans with the opportunity to take care of their families. That’s who we are today. Who we are, what we do, why we do it and who we do it for haven’t changed. But it’s how we do it that needs to change.

With 100-plus-year-old mutual companies, you’re dealing with all these legacy systems. Your ability to put product on the street, make that product simple and understandable and affordable, and your ability to serve your customers better with these legacy technology systems are real challenges. We’re not only competing with each other, but we’re competing against every customer experience that people have.

So what’s new and different is how do we take all of that good stuff and move it into a world where we can be better at how we do it? That’s the transition going on here. That has been the theme of the vision I had, the strategic plan we had — how do we prepare ourselves for the future so that 130 years of good stuff can be another 100-plus years of good stuff going forward?

We launched the first phase of a new policy administration platform and a new customer service model. These are incredibly exciting and will serve this company well.

FELDMAN: How has technology improved your processes?

QUARANTO: We needed to bolster our IT area. We needed a project management discipline to come into the company. We not only needed actuaries but we needed data scientists who could begin to help us understand where our data was stored and how we were going to put it into a new system.

Our organization had some gaps to fill, and then we needed to be sure that we had people in the organization who were capable of handling the change that would take place and who would be excited to be part of that journey. We recognized that some of us had to hold down the fort today while we build out tomorrow. All this required a thoughtful strategy on the people side of things as well.

It took two or three years of getting ready for this before we went to market. But we found what we wanted, and by doing it right, you give yourself a greater chance of success.

As we wrap up our strategic plan, we had several milestones for this year. One was to get this thing launched and move it forward. We’re excited about it. Having the combination of the organization and its people supporting a vision and a strategy was how we approached this, and it worked well for us.

FELDMAN: Tell me how your data scientists work. I don’t believe a lot of people think about data science in life insurance.

QUARANTO: I would always joke with our chief actuary that we need to morph from actuaries to data scientists. He would say, ‘What do you mean by that?’ I said, ‘Actuaries are great at looking backward. Data scientists will be the ones who look forward, take that data and begin to do more predictive analytics. They will use that data to help us better understand and give us a greater chance of success for the things that we want to do going forward.’

This is where you get into discussions about where artificial intelligence takes us in the long run. It’s about access to data, which is difficult with legacy systems, and how you will use that data to support future planning.

FELDMAN: What are you doing with the data, and how is that helping Boston Mutual?

QUARANTO: First, we had to identify how to access our data. With a 130-year-old company, we have lots of data, but with some of our legacy systems, a lot of that data was not readily available. A lot of data was baked into some of our programming, so we had to come up with a strategy to access the data and scrub that data so that we’re using accurate data.

We’ve made great progress on that. It’s critical not only for using your data today but preparing your organization for converting from those old legacy systems to a new system because you need clean data to bring forward into the new system.

We also looked to apply more science, if you will, to our distribution and sales efforts. Where are our target markets? Who is our customer? What can we learn about them from a socioeconomic standpoint? How can we use data to identify where they live, where they work, the types of jobs they’re in, and how can we go from a broad-based approach to a narrower focus with our sales team?

Helping our people to be better at identifying these things improves our closing ratios. It also improves our participation levels with our voluntary benefit products.

We’ve also used data as far as our own employees are concerned. This gives us a better understanding of what it is about our company that makes us a viable professional employment opportunity for them and how we get feedback on who they are, what they want and how they want to grow personally and professionally — and how do we create an environment where that can happen.

FELDMAN: What are some surprising discoveries you made from using data analytics?

QUARANTO: One surprise was how hard it was to get at our data. But a good surprise was how the data validated the socioeconomic profile of who we serve. We serve a lower-middle-income market, including a lot of single mothers. Now all of a sudden, the data validated that. It helped us do a better job of thinking about the products we need to serve those people if we want to move the needle to a broader base of customers.

The people we serve are probably some of the most economically challenged people in the marketplace. Many of them want to do right by their families, and they look to us for some sort of guaranteed solution if something bad happens in their lives. But we’re seeing people struggle to make their premium payments. So we’re making sure what we do is simple and helps people understand what their options are but also allows us as a company to sort of push up and be more relevant. This gives us a little bit more stability and growth opportunities in the market we serve.

FELDMAN: Where do you see artificial intelligence taking this industry?

QUARANTO: I think that for smaller companies, AI will be used to create efficiencies of scale. We’re already on that path.

I want to apply technology to process and people to our customers. You apply technology to the process so that your people aren’t doing the process. They’re talking to the customers and creating the customer experience.

FELDMAN: You served as chairman of ACLI in 2023-2024. What are you seeing at that organization?

QUARANTO: I think the industry has come together in understanding that we must be unified in terms of presenting who we are and what our needs are, and why the industry is important. We are letting those in Washington and in the state capitals know that if there are things that will affect us, please give us a call and at least have a conversation with us.

I think ACLI is focused on the optics of the industry — showing a more positive side of what we do and the opportunities we present.

The better job we do of articulating the value of this industry at all levels — the economic level, the community level, the level of financial security for Americans — all of those other conversations become easier.

FELDMAN: What should an agent understand about the industry as you see it?

QUARANTO: When I get an opportunity to chat with our agents, the first thing I always do is just thank them. I tell them, ‘You are the front line of this industry. You’re the people out there educating people on the need to have some level of financial security. And then, God forbid, if they need to tap into that, you’re the ones who deliver the checks.’

I think we need to remind our people that this is a noble industry, doing good things for people. There are financial opportunities for agents in that, but it’s not only about financial opportunities; it’s about the ability to give back and help people.

The distribution in the industry — the sellers and the manufacturers — must come together to work on that. Because you don’t put most of what we sell on a platform and expect people to wake up and say, ‘I’m going to buy life insurance today’ and figure out what’s right for them. They still need counsel and advice. That’s what we must provide, and we must find an efficient way to do that and find good people who are happy with making a living doing that. 

Paul Feldman is publisher and founder of InsuranceNewsNet. He was a third-generation insurance agent before venturing into the media business. Contact him at [email protected].