Zinnia, a life insurance and annuity technology provider, has expanded its Zahara policy administration platform with a new whole life chassis, giving insurance carriers the ability to bring whole life products to market within roughly three months.
The launch responds to a wider shift in the permanent life insurance market, where demand for final expense and other small face value policies is pulling whole life coverage toward middle and lower income households as the population continues to age. As a result, carriers are processing policy volumes that their existing infrastructure was not designed to support.
Whole life remains the largest single segment of the permanent life market, with new annualized premium hitting $6.4bn in 2025, a record high, and accounting for 37% of total individual life premium, Zinnia said. Notably, policy counts have been outpacing premium growth for multiple quarters running, meaning insurers are issuing greater numbers of smaller policies on tighter margins that leave little scope for manual processing.
Older administration systems, built around layers of accumulated logic covering dividends, paid-up additions, policy loans and non-forfeiture rules, have made it difficult for insurers to access policy data quickly or consistently.
Zinnia’s chassis is designed to solve this by structuring Zahara as a system of record where policy data and calculations can be queried directly through APIs rather than pulled from overnight batch processes. The company says this level of access is particularly important for carriers pursuing artificial intelligence and agentic strategies, which rely on fast, structured data access that many legacy platforms cannot provide. The chassis allows insurers to configure shared product structures, calculations, business rules and workflows around their own product designs, riders and distribution requirements.
Among its core capabilities, the chassis handles product configuration and calculations covering premiums, cash values, benefits and riders; connects illustrations, case creation and issuance workflows for new business; manages post-issue servicing such as premium activity, reinstatements and surrenders; delivers policy data through digital tools for customers, agents and operations teams; and integrates with enterprise systems spanning accounting, reporting and case management.
Zinnia CEO George Esposito said, “The growth here is volume, not premium. Hundreds of thousands of small face policies. Carriers do not win that business on systems built for one-off, custom contracts. We built this chassis so a whole life product launches in a quarter and runs at volume on day one.”
Zinnia Chief Product Officer Michael Celi said, “The cost and delay in this industry usually show up in integration and testing, not in product design. We built the whole life chassis so carriers can begin testing from the earliest stages of implementation, not at the end, where most timelines break.”
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