A Zinnia Podcast
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
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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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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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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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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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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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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Branislav Nikolic, Head of Insurance at The Index Standard, explains why eight out of every ten FIA dollars still flows into the S&P 500, why excess-return indices became confusing when interest rates moved off the floor, and why the indices that have actually performed best aren't the simplest or the most complex but the ones in the middle.
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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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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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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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Nick Gerhart — former Iowa Insurance Commissioner, insurtech investor, and now COO of Homesteaders Life — makes the case that smaller carriers can finally outmaneuver the big guys. He talks about building adjacencies around pre-need insurance, why the AI governance framework needs rethinking, and why his single piece of advice to every insurance professional is the same: don't do nothing.
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Cally Myhrum, founder of Lotus Fertility Insurance, shares how a personal experience led her to build the first fertility protection product embedded in life insurance. With IVF costing $60-70K and no individual coverage options, she's creating a $265 billion blue ocean — and carriers are paying attention.
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Michelle Gordon, COO of Axonic Insurance, reveals how a startup grew to $2.1B in issued annuities in its first year — with its own cloud-built policy admin system and 125 employees. Plus, her passionate case for why the SEC's 1987 ruling on financial planning is harming American retirees and the insurance industry alike.
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Andrew Barnett, VP of Technology Innovation at FIG, shares how a stint in minor league baseball led him to one of the most forward-thinking tech teams in insurance distribution. He breaks down FIG's work at the IRI hackathon — including an AI agent that calls clients to gather application data — and makes a compelling case for why the industry needs to stop planning to 2028 and start shipping in weeks.
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Moshe Golomb, CEO of Juice Financial, tackles the $10 trillion check problem still plaguing insurance. After 26 years digitizing payments across retail and banking, he's bringing Uber-like transparency to insurance disbursements — from death claims to annuity payments to international stablecoins. Plus: why 20% of insurance costs are fraud, and how open banking is changing the game.
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Darren Rowe, CEO of Kadance, explains how his precision health management program is changing life insurance from a death benefit into a living benefit. Learn how genetic testing, cancer navigation, and pharmacogenomics are being embedded into life insurance policies — and why Nationwide bet on this approach.
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Paul Tyler speaks with Ash Sawhney, President and Chief Revenue Officer of Zinnia, about the transformative changes in the life insurance and annuity sectors. They discuss the evolution of underwriting, the impact of technology and AI, and the entrepreneurial journey within the insurance industry.
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