Solving a headache for parents

A ONE-STOP SHOP FILLED WITH FINANCIAL TOOLS TO HELP FAMILIES PLAN THEIR FUTURES

Founded in 2015, Fabric was acquired by Western and Southern Financial Group in 2022 and rebranded to Fabric By Gerber Life.

Co-founders Adam Erlebacher and Steven Surgnier (formerly COO and director of data respectively at digital bank Simple Finance) found, as new parents, there was no modern, convenient way for them to protect their families’ financial futures. The insurtech was born out of those frustrations.

Erlebacher recalls his experience: “The process of getting a will turned out to be very expensive and required meeting with a lawyer. It was so hard to find time that it literally took us three years to write a simple two-page document. And when I went to buy life insurance, it took ten weeks, a health exam, and three meetings with an agent who was pushing me to buy a more expensive product that would have earned him a bigger commission.

“As dads, we realised that there was no modern way for parents to confidently check these otherwise daunting tasks off their lists, and that’s why we started Fabric.”

Its products and services include: life insurance policies, college savings and rainy-day savings funds that are tailored to younger families; free wills for parents – regardless of whether they are a policyholder or not, Fabric offers its Will Kit to make estate planning a simple matter; a modern iOS and Android compatible app with easy navigation that offers simple accessibility and extra tools for spouses to share; added security features that protects personal information with bank-level security that incorporates adaptive risk-assessment security, 256-bit encryption, two-factor authentication, automatic lockout, and biometrics; and support features such as a personalised checklist of financial tools to help families grow.

“What we did from the beginning was to focus on making life insurance a quick and easy digital experience. Something that used to take 10 weeks, we’ve distilled down to a 10-minute application where you get an instant offer. That was revolutionary,” says Erlebacher.

“On top of that, we’ve taken a very different approach to the market, which is the one-stop shop. We began with building a full-stack digital will service that’s proprietary to Fabric and we’ve continued to invest in that. Beyond that, we’ve also rolled out tools to organise your family’s finances. Now we are building full-stack versions of some of these key products and are much more deeply integrating them into the experience across products.

“What gets us really excited in 2023 is that we want to offer families the power of compound interest in a tax-advantaged way. We want to make it very easy for parents to take whatever savings they’re able to invest and give them a simple way to do it. That’s a key product launch area that we’re focussing on in 2023.

“Parents often chat at the playground about the challenges and struggles of being a parent. What’s really exciting to me and what drives us is that we want to be the go-to place for parents at the playground who ask each other ‘what do you do for life insurance or a will?’. We would love the answer to be, ‘just get Fabric and you will have everything figured out. Get that app and you’ll be good.’ That’s really the North Star that we’re moving towards.”