Adding life insurance to a website or financial platform sounds simple until you try to build it.
A customer enters their age, state, coverage amount, and health information. Your application returns life insurance options. The customer chooses a product and starts an application.
Conceptually, that’s straightforward.
Behind the scenes, however, you’re dealing with insurance carriers, product availability, rates, underwriting classes, licensing, agent assignments, electronic applications, contracting, case management, and continuously changing insurance data.
A life insurance API can eliminate much of that complexity.
Instead of building direct integrations with individual insurance carriers, insurance agencies, fintech companies, P&C platforms, CRMs, banks, credit unions, and other businesses can use an API to incorporate life insurance quoting and distribution into their existing technology.
BackNine’s API is designed for exactly that purpose.
It allows developers to retrieve life insurance quotes, embed Quote & Apply™, prefill applications with customer information, create electronic application workflows, and integrate insurance data with their own systems.
The result is simple:
Your customer experience + BackNine’s life insurance infrastructure.
What Is a Life Insurance API?
An API, or Application Programming Interface, allows two software systems to communicate with each other.
A life insurance API allows your application to send insurance-related information to another platform and receive structured information in return.
For example, your application might send:
- Date of birth
- Gender
- State
- Coverage amount
- Term duration
- Health classification
- Tobacco usage
and receive applicable life insurance quote results.
Your application can then decide how those results should be presented to the customer.
That means the insurance functionality can live inside your existing website, mobile application, CRM, agency management system, financial platform, or customer experience rather than forcing users to manually move between unrelated systems.
What Can You Build With a Life Insurance API?
A life insurance API can support much more than a simple quote calculator.
Depending on the implementation, an organization could build:
- Multi-carrier life insurance quoting
- Consumer-facing quote experiences
- Agent-facing quoting tools
- Life insurance marketplaces
- Embedded insurance experiences
- CRM integrations
- P&C cross-sell workflows
- Financial planning applications
- Banking and credit union life insurance experiences
- Lead-generation platforms
- Agent dashboards
- Product comparison tools
- Electronic application workflows
- Case-management integrations
The API becomes the insurance layer while your organization controls the customer experience.
Why Not Integrate Directly With Every Life Insurance Carrier?
You can.
But consider what that means.
Suppose you want your platform to offer products from 15 different life insurance companies.
Instead of building one insurance integration, you may need to understand and maintain relationships with 15 different systems.
Those systems could have different:
- APIs
- Authentication methods
- Product structures
- Quote formats
- Underwriting classes
- State availability
- Application processes
- Carrier requirements
- Error handling
- Data formats
- Updates
And adding Carrier #16 means another integration.
A multi-carrier life insurance platform provides an abstraction layer between your application and the insurance marketplace.
Instead of:
Your Platform → Carrier A
Your Platform → Carrier B
Your Platform → Carrier C
Your Platform → Carrier D
you can create:
Your Platform → Life Insurance API → Multiple Carriers
That can dramatically reduce the amount of insurance-specific infrastructure your engineering team needs to maintain.
BackNine’s Life Insurance API
BackNine provides a public API and developer documentation for organizations that want to incorporate life insurance functionality into their technology.
The documentation supports several integration strategies, including:
- Retrieving quotes via API
- Embedding Quote & Apply
- Prefilling Quote & Apply with customer data
- Creating electronic applications
- Working with cases, products, and appointments
- Connecting insurance workflows to external systems via webhooks
BackNine provides separate environments:
- Production:
https://app.back9ins.com - Development:
https://demo.back9ins.com
You can also create test eApps (test=true). Test eApps are deleted nightly, do not schedule a real exam, and use a non-production DocuSign. eApps with insured name Test Delete are also deleted nightly.
This means an organization doesn’t have to adopt an all-or-nothing approach.
You can use as much—or as little—of BackNine’s user interface as makes sense for your application. API keys live in BOSS > Settings > Developer Settings.
Option 1: Get Life Insurance Quotes Through the API
One of the most obvious uses is multi-carrier life insurance quoting.
Your application collects customer information.
It sends the appropriate information to BackNine.
BackNine returns available quote results.
Your application presents those results in the experience you’ve designed.
The workflow might look like:
Customer
↓
Your Website or App
↓
Your Backend
↓
BackNine Quote API
↓
Life Insurance Quotes
↓
Your User Interface
This gives your organization control over how life insurance fits into the broader customer experience.
BackNine’s API currently exposes quote-generating endpoints including GET /api/v1/quotes, POST /api/v1/quotes, and POST /api/v1/eapp-quotes. For POST /api/v1/eapp-quotes, set compare to true when you only need comparison results and do not intend to create an eApp from the returned quotes (those responses are not stored and cannot be reused as quote_id values). See API Quoting and eApp Creation.
Example: A P&C Insurance Agency
Imagine a digital P&C agency.
A customer purchases homeowners insurance.
Your platform already knows the customer’s:
- Name
- Date of birth
- Address
- State
- Phone number
After the homeowners transaction, your application could offer:
You protected your home. Would you like to see what it costs to protect the people paying for it?
The customer selects a coverage amount.
Your application obtains life insurance quotes and displays relevant options.
Instead of sending the customer to an unrelated insurance website, life insurance becomes another product within the agency’s existing digital experience. See Commercial Lines Agents.
Option 2: Embed Quote & Apply™
Not every organization needs to build its own life insurance user interface.
The simpler approach may be embedding BackNine’s Quote & Apply™ directly into your website.
Quote & Apply combines multi-carrier quoting with a digital life insurance application workflow.
BackNine provides a JavaScript-based embed (cdn.quoteandapply.io/widget.js) that can be placed into an existing webpage. Use a width of at least 980 pixels and do not set a fixed height. The platform can also be launched through a button or modal rather than permanently displayed on the page. See 3 Ways to Add Quote & Apply and the web application recipe.
The implementation can therefore look like:
Your Website
↓
Get Life Insurance Quote
↓
Embedded Quote & Apply™
↓
Quote
↓
Product Selection
↓
eApplication
This approach can be useful when you want sophisticated life insurance functionality without building the entire front end yourself.
Option 3: Prefill Quote & Apply With Customer Data
One of the biggest problems with insurance integrations is asking customers for information you already know.
Imagine a customer is logged into your financial platform.
You already know their:
- First name
- Last name
- Date of birth
- Phone number
- State
They click:
Explore Life Insurance
and immediately encounter a blank form asking for all of that information again.
That’s unnecessary friction.
BackNine supports prefilling Quote & Apply with customer information. Supported parameters can include insured details, quote preferences, product types, agent assignment, beneficiaries, ownership, and other application information.
To authenticate a prefill request, include both hmac (an HMAC-SHA256 hex digest of the payload) and referral_uid. Generate the HMAC secret in BOSS > Settings > Developer Settings and find referral_uid on your Profile page. HMAC is for Quote & Apply prefill; Create eApp by API uses API-key authentication instead.
The resulting experience can look much more seamless:
Customer is already known
↓
Customer clicks Life Insurance
↓
Known information is prefilled
↓
Customer completes only the remaining information
↓
Quote
↓
Apply
This can be especially powerful for companies that already have customer data. Use test=1 while you are building the integration.
Life Insurance APIs for Fintech Companies
Fintech companies have an unusual opportunity with life insurance.
Many already help customers manage:
- Banking
- Investments
- Retirement
- Debt
- Mortgages
- Budgeting
- Financial planning
- Business finances
Those same financial events often create life insurance needs.
A mortgage platform knows when someone takes on a large debt.
A financial planning application may know when a customer has a protection gap.
A business banking platform may serve companies with key-person or succession-planning needs.
A wealth platform may identify households whose financial plans require additional life insurance.
Historically, identifying that need and actually solving it could require sending the customer somewhere else.
An API allows life insurance to become part of the existing product. BackNine also works with banks, credit unions, and other vertical markets.
Example: Life Insurance Inside a Financial Planning App
Suppose a financial planning platform calculates that a customer has a $1.2 million life insurance need.
Instead of displaying:
You have a $1.2 million insurance shortfall. Contact an insurance professional.
the application could potentially offer:
You have an estimated $1.2 million coverage shortfall.
See Life Insurance Options
The customer selects the button.
Their information is passed into a life insurance workflow.
They see available coverage options.
And they can begin the application process.
The journey becomes:
Financial Need Identified
↓
Coverage Recommendation
↓
Quote
↓
Product Selection
↓
Application
That is a much stronger customer experience than identifying a financial problem and leaving the user to solve it somewhere else.
Life Insurance APIs for P&C Insurance Agencies
P&C agencies are another natural fit.
Most P&C agencies already have customer information that can be useful when starting a life insurance conversation.
They also have natural trigger events:
New Home
A customer purchases homeowners insurance.
Offer mortgage-related life insurance protection.
New Child
The agency updates household information.
Trigger a life insurance review.
Umbrella Policy
A customer has substantial assets or income.
Offer a broader protection review.
Commercial Insurance
A business owner may need:
- Key-person coverage
- Buy-sell funding
- Business succession planning
- Loan protection
Annual Renewal
Add life insurance to the standard account review.
An API allows these opportunities to become systematic instead of dependent on an employee remembering to ask.
Life Insurance APIs for Agency Management Systems and CRMs
BackNine already integrates with a variety of insurance and financial systems. See back9ins.com/integrations.
Public integrations include Applied/EZLynx, HawkSoft, InsuranceGig, MedicarePro CRM, NowCerts, Redtail, Vertafore (AMS360 and PL Rating), Wealthbox, and Zapier. Several can launch Quote & Apply with existing client information already prefilled. Related help articles include EZLynx, Redtail, InsuranceGig, PL Rating, and AMS360.
This illustrates an important API use case:
CRM Contact
↓
Life Insurance Opportunity
↓
Launch Quote & Apply
↓
Customer Information Prefilled
↓
Quote / Application
The producer doesn’t need to copy the client’s information from one application into another.
The integration moves it.
Life Insurance API vs. Embedded Quote & Apply
Which implementation should you choose?
It depends on how much control your organization wants.
Embedded Quote & Apply
Choose an embedded experience if you want:
- Faster implementation
- A ready-made user interface
- Multi-carrier quoting
- Electronic applications
- Less front-end development
- A complete consumer workflow
Your company controls where the experience appears, while BackNine provides the insurance-specific interface.
API Integration
Choose an API-first implementation if you want:
- A custom user interface
- Greater control over customer experience
- Quotes inside your existing application
- Custom product filtering
- Internal workflow automation
- CRM or database integration
- Custom business logic
- Deeper integration into your existing technology
Hybrid Integration
You don’t necessarily have to choose one or the other.
A particularly useful model is:
Your UI → BackNine API for quotes → Your product experience → Prefilled Quote & Apply for application
Your organization controls the discovery and quoting experience.
When the consumer is ready to apply, you hand the transaction into Quote & Apply with information already populated.
This can provide substantial customization without requiring your engineering team to rebuild the entire life insurance application process.
Build vs. Buy: Should You Build Your Own Life Insurance Platform?
For most organizations, the question isn’t whether your engineering team could build a quoting system.
It’s whether building one is the best use of engineering resources.
Consider everything surrounding the visible quote.
You may need infrastructure for:
- Carrier connectivity
- Product data
- Premium calculations
- State availability
- Underwriting classes
- Tobacco classifications
- Product changes
- Electronic applications
- Electronic signatures
- Agent assignment
- Contracting
- Case management
- Reporting
- Insurance-specific compliance
And those systems need ongoing maintenance.
For most agencies and fintechs, insurance infrastructure isn’t their primary competitive advantage.
Their advantage is their:
customers, distribution, brand, data, user experience, and existing product.
An insurance API allows the company to concentrate engineering resources on those differentiators.
Connect Life Insurance to Your Existing Customer Data
An API becomes particularly powerful when life insurance is connected to information your company already has.
Imagine a platform knows:
Customer: Jane Smith Age: 39 State: California Mortgage: $850,000 Children: 2 Current Life Insurance: $250,000
Your system calculates a protection gap.
Instead of simply alerting Jane, you can create an actionable next step.
Protection Gap Identified
↓
Recommend Review
↓
Generate Quotes
↓
Select Coverage
↓
Start Application
Your customer doesn’t have to leave the platform and begin the process again with a company that knows nothing about them.
That can be the difference between offering insurance as an advertisement and truly embedding insurance into a product.
Use Metadata to Connect Insurance Activity Back to Your Platform
Integrations become difficult when you can’t associate the resulting transaction with the record that initiated it.
BackNine’s Quote & Apply prefill functionality supports custom metadata.
That metadata is available in BOSS, CSV exports, and webhooks, so you can associate insurance activity with an internal customer ID, account ID, agency ID, campaign ID, lead source, partner ID, or marketing campaign. Metadata is limited to 256 characters. Escape special characters if you pass JSON in a script src.
That makes it easier to answer questions such as:
Which marketing campaign generated this application?
Which P&C customer purchased life insurance?
Which financial advisor originated this opportunity?
Which partner should receive attribution?
For larger integrations, this kind of data continuity can be just as important as obtaining the initial quote.
Life Insurance Webhooks and Workflow Automation
An API integration should work in both directions.
Your application sends information to the insurance system.
The insurance system also needs to communicate important events back to you.
BackNine supports webhooks for Case and Quote & Apply (electronic application) events, plus a managed Zapier integration. Configure the POST URL on the integrations page in BOSS. You may use either a custom webhook URL or Zapier for a given event type, not both.
This opens the door to workflows such as:
Application Created
↓
Update CRM
↓
Create Follow-Up Task
↓
Notify Agent
or:
Insurance Case Changes
↓
Update Internal Customer Record
↓
Trigger Customer Communication
The objective is to make life insurance part of your existing workflow rather than another system employees have to remember to check.
Authentication and Security
Insurance integrations frequently involve sensitive customer information.
Security therefore needs to be considered from the beginning.
Authenticated API endpoints use an API key (from BOSS > Settings > Developer Settings). Quote & Apply prefill requests can use HMAC-SHA256 with referral_uid to verify the integrity of submitted data.
BackNine’s BOSS platform encrypts data in transit between devices and its databases. BackNine has also published a SOC 2 Type 2 report.
Organizations integrating insurance should still perform their own security, privacy, regulatory, and compliance reviews based on the data they intend to transmit and their own obligations.
API Rate Limits and Scaling
Production applications also need to understand API capacity.
BackNine documents these defaults (exceeding them returns 429 Too Many Requests):
- Authenticated API endpoints: 100 requests per 30 seconds
- Quote-generating endpoints (
GET /api/v1/quotes,POST /api/v1/quotes,POST /api/v1/eapp-quotes): an additional sustained limit of 1,000 quote requests per hour
Some integrations may have a custom quote request limit. Contact BackNine if your integration needs additional capacity.
For an individual agency, the default limits may be significantly more than necessary.
For a large fintech, national insurance marketplace, or high-volume platform, expected traffic should be discussed during integration planning.
Development and Testing
You shouldn’t need to test an insurance integration against live customer transactions.
Use the development base URL (https://demo.back9ins.com) and test=true eApplications. Test eApps are deleted nightly and use a non-production DocuSign.
A typical implementation process might look like:
Development Environment
↓
API Integration
↓
Test Quotes
↓
Test eApplications
↓
Internal QA
↓
Production Credentials
↓
Launch
What About Licensing and Carrier Appointments?
Technology doesn’t eliminate insurance regulation.
A life insurance API makes insurance easier to distribute technically.
It doesn’t mean anyone can sell insurance without satisfying applicable licensing and carrier requirements.
The organization still needs an appropriate distribution model.
That may involve:
- Licensed insurance agents
- Proper agency licensing
- Carrier contracting
- Agent appointments
- Appropriate disclosures
- State-specific requirements
- A licensed BGA or insurance partner
Quote & Apply will halt if the writing agent is not life-licensed. Complete contracting in BOSS > Settings. Most states allow just-in-time appointments; pre-appointment states pause eSign until the appointment is active. Errors-and-omissions coverage is required before a first case.
This is another reason integrating with a BGA can be valuable.
BackNine is more than a software provider.
It’s also a Brokerage General Agency. See What is BackNine?.
That means the technology can be connected to the actual insurance distribution infrastructure behind the transaction.
API + BGA: Why the Combination Matters
A software-only provider can give you technology.
But after your customer selects a life insurance product, someone still needs to deal with the insurance business.
That can include:
- Agent contracting
- Carrier appointments
- Application submission
- Underwriting requirements
- Medical records
- Exams
- Carrier communication
- Case management
- Policy placement
- Commission accounting
BackNine combines its technology with a brokerage operation.
Its BOSS platform provides agents with access to case histories, requirements, documents, notes, commissions, reporting, and other insurance-management functions.
That creates a broader infrastructure:
Your Customer Experience
↓
BackNine API / Quote & Apply
↓
Insurance Carrier
↓
Underwriting
↓
BackNine Case Management
↓
Policy
For insurance agencies and fintech companies that don’t want to build their own life insurance brokerage operation, that combination can be particularly valuable.
Who Should Consider a Life Insurance API?
A life insurance API can make sense for organizations including:
Insurance Agencies
Add multi-carrier life insurance to an existing digital agency.
P&C Agencies
Cross-sell life insurance to homeowners, auto, umbrella, and commercial clients.
Fintech Companies
Add insurance alongside banking, lending, investing, retirement, or financial-planning products.
Banks and Credit Unions
Offer life insurance as part of a broader financial relationship.
Financial Planning Platforms
Turn identified life insurance needs into actionable insurance solutions.
CRMs and Agency Management Systems
Allow insurance professionals to quote and launch applications without repeatedly entering client data.
Insurtech Companies
Use an existing life insurance infrastructure layer instead of building every carrier relationship from scratch.
Lead Generation Platforms
Move consumers from education or lead generation into actual life insurance quotes and applications.
Large Insurance Distributors
Create custom insurance experiences while using an established brokerage infrastructure behind the scenes.
How Much Does a Life Insurance API Cost?
API and insurance technology pricing can vary considerably depending on implementation.
Possible pricing structures in the industry include:
- Setup fees
- Monthly platform fees
- API usage fees
- Per-quote fees
- Per-application fees
- Per-user fees
- Enterprise licensing
BackNine’s pricing depends partly on the distribution relationship. See pricing.
When BackNine serves as the general agency, agents can use BOSS and Quote & Apply without an agent software subscription fee. BackNine earns its general-agency compensation from insurance carriers.
BackNine also offers a SaaS model for BGAs, IMOs, and organizations that want to use their own general-agency relationships; published SaaS setup currently begins at $3,000+, with additional fees depending on the implementation.
Organizations planning API integrations should evaluate pricing based on their specific distribution model, volume, and technical requirements.
What Should You Look for in a Life Insurance API?
Don’t compare APIs only by looking at the endpoint list.
Consider the complete insurance transaction.
Multi-Carrier Access
Does the integration give you access to a useful insurance marketplace?
Real-Time Quoting
Can your application return actual quote results during the customer journey?
Multiple Product Types
Can the technology support more than basic term insurance?
Electronic Applications
What happens when the customer wants to buy?
Prefill
Can you pass data you already know into the application?
Custom User Experience
Can your organization build the experience it wants?
Embedded UI
Is there an easier implementation available when custom development isn’t necessary?
Metadata
Can insurance activity remain connected to your own customer records?
Webhooks and Data Integration
Can events flow back into your CRM, database, or application?
Development Environment
Can engineers test safely before production?
Brokerage Infrastructure
Who handles carrier appointments, underwriting, application processing, and case management after the API request succeeds?
The last question is frequently overlooked.
The difficult part isn’t producing JSON containing a premium.
The difficult part is ultimately getting a life insurance policy issued and placed in force.
A Life Insurance API Isn’t Just for Insurance Companies
One of the most significant changes in insurance distribution is that the company offering the insurance experience doesn’t necessarily have to be an insurance-first technology company.
A mortgage platform can offer life insurance.
A P&C agency can offer life insurance.
A financial planning application can offer life insurance.
A bank can offer life insurance.
A benefits platform can offer life insurance.
A fintech can offer life insurance.
The insurance functionality becomes another service inside an existing customer relationship.
That’s the idea behind embedded insurance.
Instead of asking:
“How do we become a life insurance technology company?”
the organization can ask:
“How do we add life insurance to the technology and customer relationships we already have?”
An API makes the second question much easier to answer.
Build the Experience. Let BackNine Handle the Insurance Infrastructure.
Your organization shouldn’t have to recreate the life insurance industry from scratch just to offer customers another financial product.
You may already have the difficult part:
the customer.
You may already have:
- Their trust
- Their financial information
- Their insurance relationship
- Their mortgage
- Their investment account
- Their business relationship
- Their financial plan
- Their attention
BackNine Insurance and Financial Services, Inc. provides an infrastructure layer that can help turn those relationships into life insurance opportunities.
Use the API when you want to build a custom experience.
Use Quote & Apply™ when you want a ready-made multi-carrier quoting and application experience.
Use prefill to connect existing customer information to the insurance transaction.
Use BOSS and BackNine’s brokerage infrastructure to support what happens after the application is submitted.
The result can be a complete life insurance distribution workflow:
Your Platform
↓
Life Insurance Need
↓
BackNine API
↓
Multi-Carrier Quotes
↓
Quote & Apply™
↓
Electronic Application
↓
Carrier Underwriting
↓
BOSS + Case Management
↓
Policy Placement
Start Building With the BackNine Life Insurance API
BackNine’s developer documentation includes information for retrieving quotes, embedding Quote & Apply™, prefilling customer data, creating electronic application workflows, working with insurance records, and connecting BackNine to external applications.
Whether you’re an independent agency adding life insurance to an existing website or a fintech building insurance into a national platform, you don’t necessarily need to build the insurance infrastructure yourself.
Build the customer experience you want. Connect it to BackNine’s life insurance infrastructure.
Create a BackNine account to get an API key from Developer Settings, or start with the docs.