Changing its health insurance partner to eHealthInsurance has let Insurance.com begin offering group health products that may eventually be cross-sold to the small businesses that use Fidelity Investments' 401(k) services.
The partnership between eHealthInsurance, a Sunnyvale, Calif., agency, and Insurance.com of Marlborough, Mass., was announced Monday.
EHealthInsurance is now the exclusive provider of individual health, group health, and Medicare supplemental insurance for Insurance.com, which also sells auto, life, homeowners, renters, and pet policies.
Insurance.com also runs the Insurance Center at Fidelity, a Web site that sells insurance products to Fidelity's 17 million online brokerage customers. The eHealthInsurance products are now available on that site as well.
Lou Geremia, president of Insurance.com, said his site started offering individual health products in March through an agreement with Digital Insurance Inc. Though that company did "a fine job," Insurance.com decided to switch to eHealthInsurance to get access to more carriers and a broader range of products, he said.
Insurance.com's private-label health insurance Web pages, both on the Fidelity site and the Insurance.com site, now carry eHealthInsurance products. The pages look like the other pages on their respective sites.
This differs from other deals eHealthInsurance has signed recently, such as one last week with Acordia Inc., the agency owned by Wells Fargo & Co. of San Francisco. Acordia's Web site links directly to eHealthInsurance.
Bryce Williams, vice president of business development for eHealthInsurance, said it has been working with Insurance.com on a version of the site for a while; a test version went up last month. The private-label site "is the experience they wanted," he said.
Right now eHealthInsurance and Insurance.com are focusing on selling individual policies to retirement plan participants and brokerage customers, Mr. Williams said.
If that succeeds, they plan to cross-sell group policies to some of the small businesses that use Fidelity's retirement services, he said.
