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A Zinnia Podcast

The L&A Hub

Welcome to The L&A Hub — where life insurance and annuities get put to the test. Host Paul Tyler sits down with leaders from carriers, distributors, partners, and startups to break down the experiments, decisions, and systems driving real change. What worked, what didn’t, what they learned — and what’s next. New episodes weekly. Brought to you by Zinnia.

Hosted by Paul Tyler

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All Episodes

  1. We Develop Products in Reverse Order — Eric Sondergeld on Insurance's Backwards Playbook
    S1E23
    45:55

    We Develop Products in Reverse Order — Eric Sondergeld on Insurance's Backwards Playbook

    Eric Sondergeld — Managing Director at Greenwald Research, an actuary who spent years in market research at LIMRA before moving to custom research across life, annuities, and distribution — opens with the human cost of getting customer experience wrong. When his mother died in 2019, the life carrier bounced his claim between departments, sent a checklist of documents with an envelope too small to hold them, and never once expressed condolences. When his father passed this year, the same carrier had learned to say "I'm sorry" — but mailed a cryptic claim form and, this time, no envelope at all. From that story Eric builds his central argument: the industry develops products in reverse order, starting with the distribution it already has instead of the consumer it's supposed to serve, then stopping before it ever reaches the customer. Along the way he dismantles the idea of "best practices," explains why the industry's real superpower is copy-and-paste, names the third customer nobody designs for (the beneficiary), and gives a research veteran's read on synthetic respondents and AI moderation.

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  2. Your AI Strategy Is a Document — The Operating Model Is the Difference
    S1E22
    37:41

    Your AI Strategy Is a Document — The Operating Model Is the Difference

    Sean O'Donoghue — Chief Digital, AI & Technology Officer at Security Benefit and Eldridge Wealth Solutions, who came to the retirement business by way of DreamWorks, Madison Square Garden, and Major League Soccer — argues that most insurance AI stalls not on the technology but on the operating model. He draws the line for Paul: a strategy is a document; an operating model is a system where everyone already knows who decides, who builds, how it's governed, and how data flows without needing a meeting. He reframes straight-through processing as table stakes and points to “the conversation around the button” — surfacing the consequences of a transaction just in time — as the next battleground, moves employees from “human in the loop” to “human above the loop,” and insists governance is a framework, not a committee, with the advice boundary built into infrastructure rather than decided by a model in a prompt. Security Benefit and Zinnia are affiliated companies under common ownership by Eldridge. Security Benefit is also a client of Zinnia. The views expressed by podcast guests are their own.

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  3. The Robots Took the Easy Cases — What's Left for Human Underwriters
    S1E21
    43:02

    The Robots Took the Easy Cases — What's Left for Human Underwriters

    Frank Chechel — VP and Head of Individual Life Underwriting at Gen Re, and an actuary who fell into underwriting a decade ago building an R&D team — argues underwriting is only just scratching the surface after a hundred years. He and Paul trace how COVID turned accelerated underwriting from experiment into mandate overnight, why wellness programs went quiet and are now roaring back, and how to think about AI in three layers: predictive, generative, and the still-early agentic frontier. Frank is blunt about the limits: a summary that's 95% accurate is a good way to get fired, and the same case put in front of five underwriters yields five answers. The robots are taking the easy cases — which makes the human's job harder, not obsolete.

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  4. "Break Some Dishes" — A Sitting Commissioner on Where to Move Fast on AI, and Where to Stop Cold
    S1E18
    38:53

    "Break Some Dishes" — A Sitting Commissioner on Where to Move Fast on AI, and Where to Stop Cold

    Josh Hershman — Connecticut's Insurance Commissioner, and formerly a private attorney, deputy commissioner, open-source data-standards executive (openIDL), and life insurance company CEO — gives a regulator's candid map of AI in insurance. He borrows the EU's consumer-impact tiers to argue carriers should 'break some dishes' on internal use cases while moving carefully on anything that approves or denies a claim, calls annuity illustrations the single most tailor-made AI use case in the industry, and explains why McCarran-Ferguson, the NAIC's slow model-act machinery, and the ambiguous word 'testing' leave carriers frozen.

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  5. "There's No Account With Your Name on It" — Chris Orestis Debunks Social Security's Biggest Myth
    S1E17
    34:18

    "There's No Account With Your Name on It" — Chris Orestis Debunks Social Security's Biggest Myth

    Chris Orestis has spent 30 years — first as a Capitol Hill and White House staffer, then as a three-time company founder — trying to fix the equation American families face when long-term care hits. In this conversation, he explains why only about 7 million long-term care insurance policies exist across a population of 340 million, why "care creep" quietly turns family members into unpaid full-time caregivers, and why Medicaid should be a family's payer of last resort, not their plan of first resort. He and Paul dig into the harder math underneath the headlines: the Social Security and Medicare trust funds' insolvency date has moved up from 2035 to 2032, and nothing meaningful will happen in Washington until after the 2028 election. Chris lays out the likely fix — higher earner contributions, means testing, and a possible increase to full retirement age — and makes the case that annuities, hybrid life/LTC products, are the industry's best answer to a shrinking safety net. The conversation closes on AI: why consumers are souring on bots, why AI-enabled fraud against seniors is exploding, and why verifying that an agent is a real, licensed human may be the industry's next big trust play.

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  6. "It Just Sat There" — Jeff Tulloch on Why Financial Wellness Education Never Worked
    S1E17
    32:05

    "It Just Sat There" — Jeff Tulloch on Why Financial Wellness Education Never Worked

    Jeff Tulloch spent 25 of his 30 years in insurance at MetLife, where he built PlanSmart into one of the industry's first true enterprise financial wellness programs — reaching roughly 40% of the Fortune 500 and millions of employee interactions before he went independent five years ago. In this conversation, he traces the category from a static library of articles and videos that nobody opened ("it just sat there") to today's metrics-driven model, where vendors have to prove people are actually reducing debt, building emergency savings, or raising retirement contributions — not just logging in. He connects a PwC finding that 59% of employees are still stressed about day-to-day finances to a bigger claim: financial stress may be the root cause of the physical and mental wellness problems employers spend far more money trying to solve. Plus: the turf standoff with a 401(k) provider that became a case study in complementary benefits design, why "Uber-level personalization" is coming for workplace financial education, and what three decades of watching brokers navigate benefit bloat taught him about what actually earns trust.

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  7. The Value Is in the Conversation
    S1E16
    30:35

    The Value Is in the Conversation

    Tina Beckwith, CMO of LIMRA and LOMA, debriefs the inaugural Best Minds Retirement Symposium and explains why the industry can only fix the annuity perception problem together. She unpacks a counterintuitive discovery — that AI is scraping the industry's own myth-busting content and surfacing the myths as fact — makes the case for plain language over jargon, and argues annuity awareness should be always-on, not a single month.

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  8. AI Doesn't Know How to Do Your Job. You Do.
    S1E15
    37:08

    AI Doesn't Know How to Do Your Job. You Do.

    Jane Vevea spent 20 years in life insurance before anyone would have called her a tech person. She started at Prudential in 2006 running a retention call center, wholesaled through the bank channel at PNC, got laid off, and made a sharp left turn into insurtech. That detour took her through White Swan, then Atidot — where she was predicting lapses, surrenders, and upsell opportunities using AI before most carriers had even thought to ask the question — and now to xAI, where she works as a finance domain expert on large language models.

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  9. Made by Distribution, for Distribution — How AmeriLife's Actuary Builds Products That Actually Sell
    S1E14
    51:17

    Made by Distribution, for Distribution — How AmeriLife's Actuary Builds Products That Actually Sell

    Ryan Hinchey has one of the more unique résumés in the annuity business: actuary, Amsterdam expat, Silicon Valley insurtech veteran, and now SVP of Product Innovation at AmeriLife — one of the country's largest distributors of annuity, life, and health products. In this episode, Ryan walks through the three models AmeriLife uses to partner with carriers on product development — exclusive, leverage, and proprietary — and why the best ideas increasingly come from the IMO level, not the home office.

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  10. Who Owns the Workflow? The Organizational Problem AI Actually Exposes
    S1E13
    44:17

    Who Owns the Workflow? The Organizational Problem AI Actually Exposes

    Wei Chen is an Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut School of Business and co-leader of the Digital Frontiers Initiative. His central argument: every serious conversation about AI and the workforce stops at the task level — which tasks AI can automate, which jobs are at risk. But tasks are only the bottom tier. The level that actually determines whether AI transforms an organization is the workflow: the connected chain of tasks that produces a business outcome. And the piece nobody's building is ownership — a named human who's accountable for the whole workflow, with the authority to stop it when something goes wrong.

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  11. "ROI Now Means Reliability of Income" — The Retirement Income Optimizers on Retirement's New Math
    S1E12
    37:47

    "ROI Now Means Reliability of Income" — The Retirement Income Optimizers on Retirement's New Math

    A three-guest roundtable on what's actually changing in retirement planning — and what isn't. Joe Jordan frames the demographic crisis (longer retirements, Social Security cuts coming, more U.S. centenarians than any country on earth). Ted Rosedale (RSSA) explains why Social Security is the biggest financial asset most Americans have and the most misunderstood. George Bain makes the case for home equity as the missing leg of the retirement stool.

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  12. "You Can't Just Slap AI On It" — Brian Poppe's Four-Phase Test for Carrier AI Adoption
    S1E11
    38:02

    "You Can't Just Slap AI On It" — Brian Poppe's Four-Phase Test for Carrier AI Adoption

    Brian Poppe — SVP of Life Insurance Solutions at Mutual of Omaha — has been an actuary, the entire innovation department, the Chief Data Officer, and now a P&L owner. In this episode he walks through his four-phase AI adoption framework, gives an honest read on where Mutual of Omaha actually sits (phases two and three), and explains why a memorial-book partnership he loved had to be killed because the timing of the offer was wrong.

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  14. "The Revolution Will Happen in the Workplace" — The Generational Comeback for Carriers in 401(k)
    S1E10
    38:17

    "The Revolution Will Happen in the Workplace" — The Generational Comeback for Carriers in 401(k)

    Ramsey Smith — former Goldman Sachs life insurance banker, Genworth board director, and Founder/CEO of ALEXIncome — argues that the next great wave of guaranteed income won't come from agents or RIAs. It will come from the 401(k) default option. He breaks down why fixed deferred is winning the in-plan annuity race, why a $140B market is just the beginning of a $5–15T total addressable market, and why this is the most important generational opportunity carriers have to take back ground they relinquished decades ago.

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  15. "A Garage Full of Mac Minis" — AI, Angel Investing, and the Next Wave of L&A Innovation
    S1E9
    42:27

    "A Garage Full of Mac Minis" — AI, Angel Investing, and the Next Wave of L&A Innovation

    James Wong built a massive IMO from scratch, sold it to a Fortune 500, and then launched The Founder's Chair — an insurance-focused angel investing platform that has funded 17 companies and deployed $11M+ in two and a half years. He breaks down what AI is actually doing to startup teams right now and shares his unfiltered read on the LPL-Anthropic deal and why it overnight made the biggest firms every startup's competitor.

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  16. Why Half Our Company Are Engineers: Reinventing the IMO
    S1E8
    33:21

    Why Half Our Company Are Engineers: Reinventing the IMO

    Patrick Kelly, Co-Founder and CEO of Signal Advisors, breaks down his IMO 4.0 thesis — the idea that modern IMOs should implement best practices through technology, not just teach them. From founding RepPro to building an AI-native IMO in Detroit, Patrick shares what it took to create features like One Click Annual Review, TruePay, and Pay Later Marketing that are changing how advisors run their businesses.

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