Mark Scafaro learned the insurance business from the inside, which is useful because the outside view is deceptively simple. A customer wants protection. A company sells protection. Somewhere between those two facts, life insurance accumulated a small civilization of forms, checks, illustrations, signatures, systems and patient follow-up calls. The product promises security. The purchase can feel like an administrative endurance event.
Scafaro did not arrive with the standard startup reflex to sweep the incumbents off the stage. He had already spent years watching large financial institutions work. His public career begins as an analyst at Morgan Stanley, moves through fixed income at BNP Paribas, then stretches across more than a decade at American Express. At MetLife Direct, he led customer acquisition and servicing. By the time he co-founded Afficiency with Ravi Arasan in 2017, he knew both sides of the institutional bargain: old systems are slow, and the institutions attached to them still hold expertise, capital, licenses, distribution and trust.
The founding insight came after exposure to a direct-to-consumer life insurance business. Demand was there. The buying process was fighting it. Scafaro and Arasan saw room for a company that could redesign the journey without pretending the rest of the industry had vanished. Afficiency would work with carriers and reinsurers to create digitally underwritten products, then make those products available to distributors through white-label experiences and APIs.
“The funding process is all about building relationships and trust.”Mark Scafaro, on raising Afficiency's Series A
The agent survived the pitch deck
The early digital-insurance script treated distribution as the obvious waste. Let consumers buy directly. Replace the agent with a funnel. Watch efficiency bloom. Life insurance proved resistant to the neatness of that idea. It is purchased rarely, explained with unfamiliar language and tied to a future most people would rather not rehearse. Many customers still value a human guide.
Afficiency's answer was to move the software around that conversation. The agent can remain present while repetitive work becomes digital: gathering information, checking data, producing a decision, collecting signatures, issuing the policy and delivering it. If those steps can happen during one meeting, the agent spends more time advising and less time chasing. The customer gets an answer while the decision still feels relevant.
This is not anti-automation. It is automation with better manners. Scafaro's strategy respects where judgment and trust already live, then attacks the handoffs that make them expensive. That posture helps explain Afficiency's position in the market. It is neither the household brand taking the policy risk nor simply a widget inside a website. It is the connective layer among product manufacturing, underwriting and distribution.
An API cannot rescue the wrong product
Scafaro is careful about a distinction the technology business often flattens. Making an insurance product available through an API does not automatically make that product digital. If the underwriting still waits for manual intervention, if the signature comes later, or if the policy cannot be issued in the session, a modern interface merely gives an old delay a cleaner doorway.
Afficiency therefore works upstream. The underlying insurance product must be designed for instant consumption. Pricing, underwriting rules, data, signatures and distribution have to fit together before a distributor can offer a smooth experience. The software is only the visible portion of a negotiated system.
That systems view reflects Scafaro's career. Morgan Stanley and BNP Paribas offered an education in markets. American Express added strategy inside a consumer financial network. MetLife put acquisition, servicing and insurance in the same frame. His Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Sydney preceded all of it. Afficiency looks like the synthesis: financial machinery, consumer experience and insurance product design forced to share one calendar.
Build the bridge, then widen it
Scafaro describes Afficiency's intermediary role as a source of expertise. The company listens to distributors because they know their customers and selling contexts. It works with carriers and reinsurers because they understand risk and product economics. Afficiency carries what it learns across the gap. In his concise formulation, “We get to be experts in both those fields.”
One example is an income-protection product. Its basic promise can be expressed as a monthly benefit, but its setting can change. Beside a mortgage, it can protect the payment. In a workplace, it can protect a paycheck. The core insurance logic remains stable while the API allows a distributor to present it in language and a journey suited to its customers. The platform earns its keep by separating the durable product from the adaptable storefront.
The same pragmatism shaped fundraising. In April 2022, Afficiency announced a $7 million Series A led by IA Capital Group, with Impression Ventures, SBLI and Western & Southern Financial Group participating. It brought reported funding to $10.2 million. Two strategic insurance investors mattered beyond their checks. A company coordinating risk, product and distribution benefits from shareholders who understand why each piece moves slowly.
Scafaro said the difficult part was teaching investors the intricacies of the buying process and the company's unusual place inside it. His advice to founders was equally unfashionable: identify the piece of the business model that is essential to the long-term vision, make it work, and resist distractions. It is the counsel of an operator who has seen complexity win by exhausting attention.
Culture is another piece of infrastructure
When the Series A arrived, Scafaro spoke about hiring and product expansion in the same breath. More people would help Afficiency launch more products and sell more policies, but growth introduced a different risk: the company could drift from its mission as the team expanded. He treated culture as something to reinforce deliberately, not a cheerful paragraph written after the operating system was complete.
Afficiency's published values are respect and honesty, courage and curiosity. They sound agreeable because company values usually do. Inside this particular business, they also describe requirements. Carrier partnerships cannot survive evasiveness. Reworking regulated products takes nerve. Translating between underwriters, engineers, distributors and customers demands persistent questions. Culture here is less about office decoration than the behavior required to keep a complicated coalition moving.
His view of the office was similarly practical. In 2022, while Afficiency prepared a New York space, Scafaro did not call everyone back to a desk by default. He wanted flexibility for focused work and a place where the team could gather to collaborate and brainstorm. The goal was to use each setting for what it did well. That is also a neat description of the company: preserve the useful parts of an existing arrangement, redesign the handoffs, and refuse to mistake one format for the whole job.
Progress arrives as a product, not a proclamation
Afficiency's later launches make the strategy tangible. In 2023, the company, Quility and SBLI reported that Quility Level Term had passed 46,000 policies and $13 billion in live coverage, while adding broader eligibility and improved agent workflows. The announcement is useful because it joins scale with iteration. The digital product was not finished at launch. It kept learning from the channel selling it.
In July 2025, Afficiency and Foresters Financial launched Live Well Plus, bringing participating whole life insurance into a guided, single-session digital journey with accelerated decisions available on qualifying applications. Whole life is a more involved product than the simplest term offering. Digitizing illustration, decision, signature, issue and delivery in one experience tested the company's claim that its approach could travel up the complexity curve. Scafaro called the team “intensely proud of our collaboration.”
Three months later came NewBridge Final Expense with Continental General, designed as a digital, agent-assisted product offering an in-session underwriting decision. The sequence is revealing. Afficiency is not using software to narrow insurance into one generic product. It is using shared rails to make a broader shelf of products easier to manufacture and distribute.
The best infrastructure knows when to be visible: during the hard work, not during the customer's hard conversation.The Afficiency operating idea
A patient kind of ambition
There are small clues to Scafaro outside the platform diagrams. He is married and has three sons. A podcast conversation began with sailing. Asked for a favorite outdoor dining spot in New York, he picked Baar Baar in the East Village. These details do not unlock a management theory, thankfully. They simply place a person beside the chief executive title: an Australian-educated finance veteran in Westport, working on a New York company and choosing an Indian restaurant when the interview briefly escapes underwriting.
His public comments return to patience, relationships and focus. Even his forecast for embedded insurance comes with conditions. Fast decisions make it possible to offer life coverage during another transaction, such as arranging a mortgage. But convenience alone will not create demand. The value proposition still has to be compelling, and agents still have a role, particularly as products grow more complex.
That restraint may be the most portable part of his story. Scafaro did not confuse modern technology with a license to ignore old knowledge. He found a way to let carriers carry risk, distributors own their customer journeys and agents conduct the human conversation, while Afficiency turns the paperwork between them into software. The startup lesson is pleasantly concrete: before removing a participant, ask which delay every participant would gladly remove together.