Samsung, 1Life and LifeQ team up to launch a new life insurance program

Life is a funny thing, isn’t it? One day you’re just doing what comes natural, going out to your favourite pubs and night spots, not considering the dangers of existence, and the next you’re locked up inside your lounge, terrified to put a foot outside the front door. But even in the face of global annihilation, it’s important to never compromise on your health.

It’s something more and more companies have begun to realise. That is, the necessity of a healthy life and, of course, the profits that can be gleaned from it. Perhaps that’s too cynical a way of looking at life insurance so maybe the new joint venture between Samsung, 1Life and LifeQ to set up a more forward-facing life insurance system will be enough to shake you from your hapless, dangerously carefree existence.

YOLO?

So how exactly does this partnership work? Well, it’s a combination of insurance plans and technological wearables afforded by Samsung and LifeQ. By using 1Life Pulse, a lifestyle monitoring and management system, users can directly influence their life cover growth. According to a post on Samsung’s official blog, using 1Life Pulse alongside devices such as the Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2 can grow an individuals life cover from ” R216 per day, or up to R6 560 per month, starting from day one”.

“We can’t all be athletes or go to the gym, especially now with social distancing – but we can all do the activities of ‘life’ well and this is what the 1Life Pulse product and eco-system encourages,” says Laurence Hillman, CEO of 1Life.

So how does this work? Well, Samsung’s VeoSens App is said to provide a continuous “real time snap shot” of a user’s physical health. So rather than just taking data based on an individual statistic like the number of steps a person has taken or how many hours a sleep one gets each night, this partnership is about monitoring all your daily activities and translating them into physical health statistics. Which is a little creepy. But try not to think too much about that.

“At Samsung, we are always looking for strategic partnerships that not only bolster the Galaxy ecosystem but, more importantly, deliver an unrivalled user experience coupled with exceptional consumer benefits. This partnership with 1Life does exactly this – enabling us to demonstrate our vision of a connected lifestyle to even more South Africans,” says Kagiso Khaole, Head of Content and Services at Samsung South Africa.

Positioned as a competitor to something like Discovery and their points-based Vitality system, we can see more than a few people wanting to get in on the ground floor of this program. Has it convinced us to finally cave and invest in life insurance? The eight cups of coffee we drink every day has confirmed say no, it has not.