MetLife, Inc
MetLife, Inc., also known as Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, is one of the largest and oldest insurance firms globally, providing a diverse range of insurance products and employee benefits to approximately 100 million customers. Founded in 1868 and headquartered in New York, MetLife has established itself as a leader in the financial services sector, operating in all fifty U.S. states and over fifty countries. The company's primary offerings include life insurance, dental insurance, disability insurance, and annuities, with a significant focus on group life insurance since 2017, when it spun off its individual life insurance operations into Brighthouse Financial.
MetLife's history is marked by innovation, particularly in the field of industrial insurance, which helped it become the largest life insurance company in the U.S. by the early 20th century. The company transitioned to a publicly traded entity in 2000 and has continued to evolve, most recently selling its home and auto insurance business in 2021. Beyond its commercial success, MetLife is recognized for its community involvement through the MetLife Foundation, which emphasizes financial inclusion and support for underserved populations. Additionally, the brand has become culturally iconic, particularly through its long-standing partnership with the Peanuts comic strip, featuring Snoopy as a mascot. Overall, MetLife's enduring presence and broad product range make it a significant player in the insurance industry.
MetLife, Inc.
Company information
- Date founded: March 24, 1868
- Industry: Insurance
- Corporate headquarters: New York, New York
- Type: Public
Overview
MetLife, Inc. is a widely recognized insurance firm that provides insurance, annuities, and employee benefits programs to approximately 100 million customers around the world. Also known as the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company (MLIC), MetLife is counted among the world’s twenty-five largest insurance companies. Originally founded in 1868 and headquartered in New York, MetLife is one of the oldest insurance companies in North America and has long been considered a leader in the financial services market. In the mid-2020s, MetLife operated in all fifty states, the District of Columbia, and more than sixty nations.
MetLife provides a range of insurance products and services, including life insurance, dental insurance, disability insurance, auto and home insurance, annuities, and more. Its primary focus is life insurance. For many years, MetLife offered both individual and group life insurance. That changed in 2017 when the company launched Brighthouse Financial, a retail brand that assumed control of its individual life insurance offerings. As a result, MetLife itself only offers group life insurance in most markets. This means that most customers can only purchase the company’s life insurance coverage through their employer’s group plan.
MetLife markets a number of insurance products, including term life, supplemental life, dependent term, whole life, group universal life (GUL), and group variable universal life insurance (GVUL). Basic term life insurance offers the customer anywhere from ten to thirty years of life insurance coverage with premiums that remain level for the entire term of the contract. Supplemental life insurance allows the customer to purchase additional life insurance coverage at their own expense. Dependent life insurance extends the customer’s life insurance policy to cover loved ones like their spouse, partner, or children. MetLife also offers a range of whole life insurance options, which offers lifelong coverage that customers can retain after they change employers or retire. The company’s GUL and GVUL products also provide customers with life insurance options that either eliminate expiring terms or do not expire at all. Other products include annuities, homeowner’s insurance, retail banking services, and more.
MetLife operates through several distinct segments in the United States, Asia, Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), plus MetLife Holdings, and Corporate & Other. The United States segment is further divided into separate group benefits, retirement and income solutions, and property and casualty businesses. The other segments all offer their own protection products and services.
History
The history of MetLife can be traced back to the creation of the National Union Life and Limb Insurance Company in 1863. Founded by several New York businessmen, the company was designed to provide insurance coverage against battlefield injuries suffered by those fighting in the Civil War. After a less-than-successful first year that saw the company write only a meager number of life and accident policies, National Union Life and Limb was reorganized into National Life and Travelers' Insurance. Even with this change, success still proved elusive. In 1866, the company split into two separate entities, National Life Insurance Company and National Travelers’ Insurance Company. The latter started out selling only casualty policies before later adding life insurance later in 1867. By that time, National Travelers’ was led by James R. Dow, a physician who served as its president. In 1868, Dow decided to pull his company out of the casualty business and instead focus exclusively on life insurance. As part of that process, he reorganized National Travelers’ as the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, or MetLife for short.
Although it eventually came to mark a major milestone, the transformation of National Travelers’ into MetLife did not immediately resolve the company’s problems. MetLife’s struggles to survive continued for more than a decade. In the early 1870s, a severe economic depression put half of New York’s life insurance companies out of business. Although it did not succumb during this collapse, MetLife was forced to downsize several times before the end of the decade. The turning point came when then-president Joseph F. Knapp took inspiration from England’s popular industrial insurance programs aimed at blue-collar workers. At the time, American insurance companies had not yet embraced industrial insurance. This was because creating and maintaining the workforce necessary to sell policies and collect premiums door-to-door required considerable investment. To facilitate this process as quickly and efficiently as possible, Knapp started hiring experienced English agents to train his new agency force in 1879. The risk paid off almost immediately. Within a year, MetLife was signing as many as seven hundred new industrial policies every day.
MetLife’s embrace of industrial insurance finally turned the company into a successful business. In the late nineteenth century, MetLife started encouraging its agents to regularly call their clients at home as a way of building rapport and familiarity. This allowed agents to learn more about their clients' interests and concerns—information the company could use to improve its operations. By listening to its customers, MetLife quickly became the United States’ largest life insurance company.
In 1915, MetLife became a mutually held company, meaning it was owned by customers who shared in its profits. This helped the company to reach even higher levels of success in the remainder of the twentieth century. It also started branching out into offering other financial services, such as beginning to write individual retirement annuities in 1975. By the end of the century, MetLife was ready for another significant change, demutualization. With approval from the board of directors granted in 1998, MetLife began the process of transitioning into a publicly traded company. That process came to fruition with the debut of the company’s successful initial public offering (IPO) in 2000. MetLife’s success continued in the years that followed as it remained one of America’s leading life insurance companies. In 2017, MetLife spun off its US-based retail business, which sold life insurance policies and annuities to individuals, into a separate company known as Brighthouse Financial. With this, MetLife shifted to focus exclusively on providing group insurance plans and other products designed for businesses. Further changes were made in April 2021 when MetLife sold its home and auto insurance business to Farmer’s Insurance.
Impact
MetLife is one of the world's largest, best-known, and most influential insurance companies. Its rise in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries significantly impacted the development of the American insurance industry. Moreover, MetLife’s various insurance offerings have helped protect and strengthen their customers’ finances for generations. For these and other reasons, MetLife is one of the few insurance companies that successfully transcended its own line of business to become a widely recognized brand among consumers worldwide.
In addition to the impact MetLife has had through its products and strategies, the company also serves the community through its charitable arm, the MetLife Foundation. Created in 1976, the MetLife Foundation was designed to continue the company’s already long-established tradition of community support and involvement. Since its founding, the MetLife Foundation has worked with various non-profit organizations and other entities to help build better communities. It has also donated almost $900 million towards community improvement. In addition, the MetLife Foundation’s efforts have brought MetLife’s financial health work to more than 13.4 million people in low- and moderate-income people in more than forty-two markets through 2019. Since 2013, the MetLife Foundation’s primary focus has been financial inclusion. To bring much-needed financial knowledge and tools to underserved communities around the world, the MetLife Foundation developed and adopted a three-pronged approach composed of separate access to knowledge, access to services, and access to insights programs. The access to knowledge program aims to help people in underserved communities develop useful financial strategies and resources. Through the access to services program, MetLife partners with an array of financial experts to provide low-income individuals with quality financial services. As part of the access to insights program, MetLife shares the knowledge it acquires through its work with underserved communities to help improve its techniques and advance its efforts to help improve those communities.
Much of MetLife’s success in building and maintaining a recognizable and friendly brand identity is due to some of its key marketing decisions. One of MetLife's most beneficial marketing decisions was partnering with the iconic Peanuts comic strip brand. In 1985, MetLife brokered a deal with Peanuts creator Charles Schulz to make Snoopy and the other Peanuts characters their official mascots and brand ambassadors. Snoopy and the gang remained a part of MetLife and its advertising for over thirty years and continued to be closely associated with the insurance company even after the partnership ended in 2016. For much of that same period, Snoopy was also seen on the side of the famous MetLife blimp, which regularly spread awareness about the company as it flew over America and provided aerial television coverage of various special events. In 2023, the company again partnered with Snoopy to raise awareness about the importance of pet insurance.
Bibliography
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