Funeral home owners, cemetery operators, preneed professionals. We’re the experts in the death care profession. We know the business, we understand the clientele, and we know what is good for everybody. Or do we? I’m guessing that is somewhat how the buggy whip manufacturers, horse livery operators, and sales reps in that industry thought of themselves while Henry Ford and others were going about changing the way American moved by figuring out a way to build an automobile at a […]
According to this article National Guardian Life (NGL), a mainstay in the funeral preneed insurance market, has announced that it has acquired the company Everplans. Everplans is described in the article as a digital life planning company that “helps consumers store, organize and share important documents online, and helps users get started with estate planning.” Again, according to the article, Madison, Wisconsin, based National Guardian Life branched out a few years ago by adding Long-Term Care insurance to its portfolio […]
Funeral Director Daily has a few readers in the English speaking parts of the world outside of North America. We have followers in Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. However, it is not too often that we get news from those regions. Today, we are bringing you three articles from various parts of the world. When we do get news from those locales, however, it is interesting to note how common the issues are between the differing countries and the […]
Some trends become tidal waves. This article from Great Britain insurer SunLife takes into account what they saw in 2020 as reported in their “Cost of Dying” report. You can access the company’s synopsis of the Great Britain death care market here. One of the findings, which is more than likely pandemic induced, but also a growing trend for the future, is that the percentage of Direct Cremations is growing rapidly. According to the report, as we read it, Direct […]
With the Christmas holiday coming up this weekend Funeral Director Daily will not be publishing on Thursday or Friday of this week. As usual, there is plenty in our industry to tell you about, but with the limited days and multiple stories we thought we would just use this afternoon to give you some teasers on articles that you may look up yourself. First of all, we bring you this information from Adidas. . even though there is no article […]
We continue to roll out the earnings reports of the public death care companies and today is no exception. Today we tell you about one of the quieter companies that is starting to make a name for themselves as they grow. That company is Utah based Security National Financial Corporation (SNFC) and divisions of the company are involved in mortuaries, cemeteries, funeral funding through insurance assignments, and preneed insurance. In essence, from our point of view, while still small by […]
In late October Assurant hinted that they will be divesting what they call their Global Preneed business. That segment of their business consists of preneed funeral insurance products and Final Need insurance products. In reporting the company’s 3rd Quarter financial results, CEO Alan Colberg gave another hint as to the Global Preneed business potentially disappearing from the Assurant portfolio of businesses. He did not mention Global Preneed at all when he said of 3Q results, “Our third quarter 2020 performance […]
Last week Assurant, the large financial conglomerate with operations in 21 countries, announced that they would acquire mobile device software as a service (SaaS) business HYLA. You can read about that in this Associated Press release. In conjunction with that announcement, Assurant also made other announcements including a strategy to divest themselves of what they term their Global Preneed Division. Assurant has been in the preneed business for over 50 years and you can read about that division here. Here […]
Yesterday Funeral Director Daily published an article about cemeteries and in that article we made the assertion that the COVID experience of 2020 will probably have some type of long-term effect on funerals going forward. That statement was made mostly in reference to what has happened with funeral attendance due to the social distancing practices that have been imposed from place to place. It’s been my experience that when an individual is forced to change a habit, sometimes that forced […]
In today’s Afternoon Edition we will provide you with some articles that came out over the weekend. There is probably something for everybody’s interest in these articles as we always find that it is interesting to catch up with what is going on in other parts of the United States or in other parts of the world. Here’s what we have today: North Carolina among the last states to make death records electronic. North Carolina has, according to this article […]
