Early years The Bankers Life and Casualty Company was established in 1932 as a
mutual life insurance company in
Chicago, Illinois. In contrast to most other life insurance companies, whose costs included salaries for accountants, sales agents, officers, and
actuaries, Bankers Life minimized its overhead as a means of undercutting the monthly insurance premiums of its competitors. By June 1935, however, corporate mismanagement rendered the company
insolvent by $631.11 , resulting in the seizure of its assets for
liquidation by the
Illinois Insurance Department. Under MacArthur, the company employed its policy of minimal overhead to undercut the $10 minimum monthly premiums of competitors with $1, $2, and $5 monthly premium policies. To sell more policies without hiring additional sales agents, the company began mailing its sales pitches to middle-income families, a demographic traditionally underserved by the insurance industry. In September 1942 he established two
shell companies, of which one, the Illinois Standard Life Insurance Company, would serve as the new company. While the Hotel Men's Mutual Benefit Association did not bring many new policyholders to Bankers Life, the Illinois Insurance code allowed the new company to assume the former's founding date of January 17, 1879, as its own. Now the president and sole shareholder of Bankers Life, MacArthur expanded the company's marketing efforts with a $105,000 magazine advertising contract. Despite the new Bankers Life being largely identical to its former iteration, advertisements promoting it often made use of Hotel Men's 1879 founding date via claims such as "Chicago’s First Insurance Company—Established 1879". The company's rapid expansion was fueled by a staff that included sales agents, claims adjusters, billing processors, and
addressograph operators, with the staff at its headquarters growing from 50 employees in 1940 to over 2,000 by 1955. becoming one of the largest health and accident insurance companies in the United States by 1956. On October 18, 1970, he established the
MacArthur Foundation, a
private foundation that would inherit the majority of his estate after his death and put it to use in support of charitable causes. While this included his position as sole shareholder of Bankers Life, the
Tax Reform Act of 1969 would require the foundation to eventually divest it. In October 1974 MacArthur resigned as president of Bankers Life, naming Robert Ewing as his successor. By 1977 the company had become the second largest health and accident insurance company in the United States, with a workforce of nearly 4,000 employees across 47 states (excluding California, New Jersey, and New York), Washington, D.C., and the Canadian provinces of
Ontario and
Quebec. On October 30, 1984, the foundation sold Bankers Life for $382 million to the
Texas-based Great Southern Life Insurance Company, a subsidiary of the
Louisville, Kentucky based I.C.H. Corporation, an insurance industry
holding company. On November 9, 1992, I.C.H. Corporation sold Bankers Life for $600 million to
Conseco, a
Carmel, Indiana based insurance industry holding company, known as CNO Financial Group since 2010. In 1993 Bankers Life moved its headquarters into the
Merchandise Mart building in downtown Chicago. On January 1, 2000, Conseco merged another of its insurance industry subsidiaries, Certified Life Insurance Company, into Bankers Life. In 2012, Bankers Life processed about 8.5 million claims and paid out $1.3 billion in policy benefits. In 2015, Bankers Life had $19 billion in assets under management. == Sponsorships ==