Ohad Gutman Wants the Insurance Check to Be a Beginning

The insurance check has cleared. The claim is closed. Somewhere, a dashboard has turned green, a service target has been met and a file has slipped into the archive. This is the moment when Ohad Gutman becomes interested. To the insurer, the machinery has worked. To the beneficiary, the machinery has merely stopped. Papers remain. Accounts must be found. Probate may wait around the corner wearing its least charming suit. A large sum of money has arrived along with a larger collection of decisions. The institutional relationship, having performed its grand contractual act, is preparing to bow. Gutman would prefer that it remain onstage.

As Chief Business Officer of Empathy, Gutman has made this awkward interval his public brief. His subject is the post-claim gap: the distance between a company completing a transaction and a person completing everything that follows it. It sounds like the sort of phrase one might encounter on a conference badge. In his telling, it becomes a sharp question of design. Who decided the customer journey ends where the workflow does?

Gutman is an operator by formation. In a 2021 trademark filing, he appeared as Empathy's Head of Business Operations. The company's Better Business Bureau record later listed him as Director of Business Operations. By 2025, he was writing under the title Chief Business Officer. The sequence matters. His argument about insurance did not arrive from a distant theory shop. It grew from the discipline of making a young company function, then asking how that function might travel through insurers, employers and financial institutions.

The file closes. The work does not.

In 2026, Empathy and LIMRA examined the experiences of 272 life-insurance claimants, supplementing the survey with 12 in-depth interviews. The operational news was good. Respondents gave overall satisfaction an average score of 4.22 out of five. Communication, instructions and payment timing were generally rated well. The commercial news was peculiar: fewer than one in ten beneficiaries returned to buy a policy from the same carrier.

That mismatch gives Gutman's case its bite. Faster processing is valuable, but the research found that, once people felt informed and supported, speed and contact frequency did not independently predict whether they would recommend the carrier or buy from it. The stronger predictor was what the researchers called post-claim perception: the beneficiary's view of the institution after the payout was complete. The check kept the promise. What happened next shaped the memory.

The easiest response would be more outreach, a prospect that should alarm anyone who has ever met an automated email sequence. Gutman's prescription is more exacting. Contact must be relevant. Early on, people may want confirmation that a claim has been received and a plain account of what comes next. More involved guidance can arrive later, when there is room to use it. The beneficiary's capacity, rather than the institution's calendar, should set the pace.

There is an operator's neatness to this idea. It turns compassion from a foggy corporate virtue into a series of decisions: what information appears, who retains context, when a person takes over from software, and whether the next interaction helps. Gutman has described the right model as human plus machine, with automation removing friction without removing accountability. Technology, he wrote after the 2025 InsureTech Connect conference, should make the complex navigable and bureaucracy humane.

An education in useful systems

The earlier entries in Gutman's public record have the same practical tilt. In 2013, he volunteered with Tel Aviv University's Different Economy Project, giving financial guidance on household responsibility, budgeting and consumption. From October 2014 to August 2015, he led a team with the NOVA Project, which supplied management consulting to nonprofits and social enterprises. The settings were different, but the connective tissue is visible: finance explained to people, and organizations made more effective in service of people.

He later studied at the London School of Economics, where his public profile notes a distinction, and was named a Chevening Scholar in 2016. His public biography is otherwise spare. There is no grand personal manifesto attached to the record, which leaves the work to do most of the talking.

At Empathy, founded in 2020, operations offered no shortage of consequential detail. The company began by helping families manage the administrative load after a loss. Its service combined digital tools with human guidance for tasks that do not politely arrange themselves: documents, accounts, benefits and the assorted red tape of an estate. The business sold that support through institutions, placing Empathy behind insurers and employers rather than asking every family to discover it alone.

That model made business operations unusually central. Each partnership needed to translate a promise of care into access, workflows and a handoff that did not feel like one. By 2024, Empathy said it worked with seven of the ten largest US life carriers and reached more than 40 million people. In 2025, the company raised a $72 million Series C, reported that annual revenue had doubled, and expanded from the United States into Canada and the United Kingdom. Gutman's role expanded along the same arc, from building the internal apparatus to explaining the external proposition.

The arithmetic of staying

Gutman does not frame post-claim support as charity smuggled into a business plan. He makes the commercial argument without apology. The United States life-insurance industry pays more than $100 billion in death benefits each year. Every payment reaches someone making financial decisions and, consciously or not, evaluating the institution that has just kept an old promise. Among surveyed beneficiaries who were not fully satisfied, 71 percent said a better experience would have made them more likely to buy a policy from that carrier. Even satisfied customers said improvement could deepen their intent.

One finding is especially tidy. Among people who received financial education from their insurer after a claim, confidence in managing the payout was 96 percent. Among those who did not, it was 76 percent. A twenty-point difference does not settle every causal question, but it does reveal the possible value of one well-placed intervention. The money is identical. The person's relationship to it is not.

This is where Gutman's operating language and Empathy's mission meet. “Coverage is now table stakes. Care is the strategy,” he wrote in 2025. The line has the polish of a conference conclusion, but underneath it sits a less glamorous program: preserve context, offer guidance, do not make people repeat themselves, and resist mistaking corporate completion for human completion.

His scope has widened with the company. Empathy has added legacy-planning tools and support for workplace leave, and Gutman has described the original loss product as a blueprint for the moments that divide life into “before and after.” In early 2026, he publicly welcomed the company's UK expansion and invited British institutions to call its local leader. There was gratitude for the team, a brisk statement of opportunity, and then the operator's reflex: here is the person to ring.

That public manner is consistent. He praises colleagues plainly. He returns to the combination of human guidance and strategic technology. He favors evidence over misty declarations, yet he is willing to use moral language about what a system owes the person at its edge. In a workplace-benefits post, he recalled seeing a colleague return to her desk three days after losing her father. The observation became a challenge to the structures around her: readiness for work on paper had little to do with readiness in life.

A longer definition of done

The attraction of Gutman's thesis is that it asks institutions to redefine completion. Claims departments have obvious measures: accuracy, speed, closure. The post-claim period is harder to own because it belongs to no traditional box. Yet that is precisely why an operations executive might see it. White space in an organization is often where a customer's unfinished work has been hiding.

There are limits to the thesis. Care can become another word polished smooth by marketing. Continued contact can become pursuit. Software can claim intimacy it has not earned. Gutman's own framework contains a useful guardrail: people do not want contact for its own sake. They want relevance, timing and continuity. The institution must be helpful enough to stay and disciplined enough to know when not to intrude.

This makes the job less like sending a campaign and more like designing a bridge. On one side sits the insurer's completed obligation. On the other sits a family still sorting documents, accounts and decisions. Gutman wants technology to carry some weight, people to carry context, and institutions to recognize that the far bank exists.

For Gutman, the insurance check is therefore a revealing object. It is evidence that a promise has been honored, but also an invitation to decide what sort of company made it. One can disappear with perfect efficiency. Or one can remain, without fuss, for the next hard piece of work. The first closes a file. The second may open a future.