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
Life Happens has spent 16 years building the Insurance Barometer Study with LIMRA, one of the industry's most-used reads on how Americans think about life insurance. Executive Director Brian Steiner joins Paul Tyler and LIMRA's Chris Curran, Head of Global Brand and Marketing, live from LIMRA Annual 2026.
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Ameritas CEO Bob Jurgensmeier, an actuary by training, says demographics explain part of the protection gap, but research tells a more hopeful story: most people already believe they need coverage. Recorded live at LIMRA Annual 2026, he argues the industry has no messaging problem, only a reach problem. He explains how a mutual carrier weighs growth investments, why the workplace offers a largely untapped door, and why affordability remains the biggest myth when young, healthy buyers guess costs at ten times the real price.
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Chris Blunt, CEO of Peak Altitude Equity, marks his fortieth year in the industry. Recorded live at LIMRA Annual 2026, he argues the industry grew through larger premiums from affluent clients and left the middle market behind, where process matters as much as product. He makes the case for living benefits, combination products, and part-time agent paths that work more like Uber than a black car service. He also shares a personal story about losing his brother, and calls on the industry to grow the pie together.
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A special collaboration with Nasdaq and LIMRA, recorded live at LIMRA Annual 2026. Paul Tyler, Nasdaq's James Caparosa, and LIMRA and LOMA CEO Dave Levenson trace the protection gap from end to end with six industry leaders. Ameritas CEO Bob Jurgensmeier says buyers know they need coverage, but nobody asks them. Integrity's Tom Dempsey and Simplicity's Scott Truka target friction in the buying process. Rob TeKolste of Sammons, John Hancock CIO Kartik Sakthivel, and Peak Altitude's Chris Blunt cover rising expectations, legacy systems, and middle-market product.
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North Dakota Insurance Commissioner Jon Godfread, who helped shape the NAIC's approach to AI almost by accident, explains why regulators favor principles, governance, and exams over prescriptive new laws. He describes the AI exam pilots now running in twelve states, consumers filing chatbot-drafted complaints that cite the wrong statutes, and why regulators now build their websites for AI agents. He closes with blunt advice for carriers: get moving, start with low-risk back-office work, and talk to your regulator before you launch.
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Dennis Martin — President of Individual Life and Financial Services at OneAmerica Financial, an actuary who entered the industry in 1991 and has led OneAmerica's life and long-term care businesses since 2018 — dismantles the industry's favorite statistic in one sentence: the trillion-dollar coverage gap is a significant unmet need, but there is no unmet demand. Life insurance demand is generated, not natural, and it is generated by producers — the resource in shortest supply for twenty years. From there he traces the pandemic's role as "the ultimate accelerator," draws the line between going electronic and going truly digital, makes the contrarian demographic case for long-term care, and argues that unless you are Anthropic or OpenAI, AI is not your business — it's fuel for your business.
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Katherine Dease, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at the Insured Retirement Institute, and formerly a product leader at Ebix (now Zinnia) and Insurance Technologies, runs the Digital First for Annuities initiative with one goal: make an annuity as easy to transact as a mutual fund. She walks Paul through the paperless replacement standard that took carrier-to-carrier replacement business from an average of 18 days to 24 hours, a 94% reduction in cycle time, with 12 carriers and the DTCC live, more than 50,000 transactions processed, and close to 30 carriers expected by year end.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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