Why Half Our Company Are Engineers: Reinventing the IMO

Paul Tyler (00:29) Hi, this is Paul Tyler and welcome to another episode of the LNA Hub. And I've got a great guest this time, by the way, dangerous guest. I had him on another podcast and he gave a pitch so good, I almost got into a lot of trouble with my former employer. That's another story.

Patrick Kelly (00:47) And I thought I was just going to explain why and what we do at Signal. I didn't realize how dangerous that was.

Paul Tyler (00:55) Yeah, yes. Sometimes value propositions are just too compelling. And I would say that is what our guest, Mr. Patrick Kelly, CEO and founder of Signal Advisors, is joining us today. Pat, welcome.

Patrick Kelly (01:09) Thank you Paul. I'm very excited to be here with you and we're going to talk about a lot of different things. We've been hard at work. It's a global landscape. The technology perspective is moving so fast that we could probably talk for hours and hours and hours. But I'm excited. I'm excited to jump into the conversation.

Paul Tyler (01:29) Yeah, well, first question, obviously, tell people who you are. Tell us what you're doing. Tell us your back story. I mean, you've been involved in some really interesting ventures that have kind of led you to do what you're doing today.

Patrick Kelly (01:43) Yeah, no, happy to. So I started out as a financial advisor, captive at Northwestern Mutual, and then I was in my four walls and didn't even know independent financial advisory existed. And I started an independent financial advisory firm with my mom and my close friend at Northwestern Mutual actually. And through that experience, I found out what an IMO was, what insurance distribution was, what annuities are. Insurance I did, but I didn't do any indexed universal life. I was just doing whole life at Northwestern Mutual. Kind of found out about the wealth management landscape. So I started doing all of this stuff in practice as a financial advisor.

And you know through those experiences I realized — I was like, Northwestern Mutual is the largest direct issuer of insurance in the world at that time and in the United States — I was shocked by kind of like the processes internally, you know, like filling out 60 page applications. This is 2012 timeframe, like filling out 60 page applications. I thought the hard part was going to be convincing somebody to buy something from me. It turned out the hard part was like the logistics of getting them the thing they purchased. And I was like, that's crazy. Like if this is happening at Northwestern Mutual, it's probably happening in other places. I had that thought. And then I experienced that kind of even more on steroids because as an independent financial advisor, I'm dealing with a lot of different insurance companies and I realized they were all doing it the same way Northwestern Mutual was. I'm like, this is insane.

The experience for buying an annuity or time disability insurance or long-term care insurance or any of these products, it should be like an Amazon shopping experience or like at least opening a bank account. So I just kind of thought that was such a painful thing that someone had to solve it. And I was looking around and I wasn't really seeing anybody do anything meaningful there. So I built what I know as the first electronic application platform for fixed and fixed index annuities in the IMO business, independent annuity distribution — partnered at the time with Advisors Excel. They were investors in that business. It's called RepPro. But the idea was around simplifying order entry and it was all around kind of a universal application. So the idea was you get one form and we're gonna map this one form to all the carrier specific forms.

Paul Tyler (03:59) That's too revolutionary.

Patrick Kelly (04:03) It was a little early and it was like — the convincing of the carriers was a very hard, very hard problem. And convincing the advisors to do this process was very hard. They're focused very much on sales and very much on marketing, and operations was not necessarily the most compelling value prop for them because they were like, I'm making all this money. Why do I need to use this technology? I'll just scratch the app, as they used to say.

So we got some success, started getting some critical mass on distribution. We sold the business to Annexus. Annexus is a product design company. What Ron Church and the team have done over there is incredible. They've kind of really created the category. And I got a chance to work with their executive team and all the awesome folks over there. And I was there for three years and I was selling technology into IMOs and carriers, and I heard all these IMOs and all these carriers kind of talk about how they value technology. But it became very clear to me that a lot of it was lip service because like when you talked about budget allocation, there just wasn't any money to spend on the solutions that I was providing. And so I was like, okay, if it's so hard to get people to spend money on these things, then clearly they don't value it very much, even though they might be stating something different.

I'm gonna build a company that uses this technology as its wedge, as its differentiation to add value into advisors' lives. And so that was kind of my journey to build Signal Advisors. It was like, I'm a financial advisor, I'm struggling with these things, how can I fix my own problems? So that was RepPro, that was Signal, kind of all these things are gonna stem from me being an advisor and thinking the world should kind of work a little bit differently than it does even today honestly.

Paul Tyler (05:52) Yeah, well, you know, timing is everything. I remember Repro, I saw that. I think that's how we first met. I think this is great. And it's funny, there's so much emotion around forms in this business. It's like, really.

Patrick Kelly (05:56) Yeah, it is.

It's like death, taxes, and PDFs. They're going to be here forever.

Paul Tyler (06:11) I know. And it's like, okay, you know, the solution that kind of takes the industry by storm, it makes it look like you have a form taped to your screen. And it worked. It worked. You know, kudos to the company that did that.

Patrick Kelly (06:21) Yeah, it's pretty much. I mean, didn't Firelight — I mean, we used Firelight today. They did a nice job. But I think like the reality is, and again, it can be so much better. That's like constantly like I see it and I'm like, this can be so much better. And I think everyone has that feeling. It's about execution because everyone has these ideas. You know, we're talking about ideas before we got on here. It's like who's going to deliver the thing that hits the right node that now everyone realizes that this is the way the world has to be going — there's no going back. And so that was driving us to all the new things we're building at Signal.

Paul Tyler (06:59) Yeah, well, you know, I was going to call you anyway to get you on this next generation podcast here. But then I open up LinkedIn and here's the announcement, right, of some really cool agentic stuff you're doing. What do you want to talk about? Tell people about what you just released.

Patrick Kelly (07:05) Yeah, sure. So, well, maybe I'll say my whole entire view. Like if I think about the IMO world, so we're an IMO, we're an annuity distributor, but you know, we're a technology enabled annuity distributor and we're like kind of part software company, part IMO.

And if I think about the IMO landscape, I think you have essentially IMO 1.0 as I call it, 2.0 and 3.0. 1.0 is about just getting people licensed. Hey, there's this product called fixed index annuity. I don't know what the heck it is. Let's just get people licensed to sell this stuff. 2.0 was about training advisors. Products were getting more complicated — hybrid indices, smart data indices, multi-year point-to-points, laddering strategies. How do we train financial advisors or insurance agents, like how to sell this more complex product, how do we train them? So like make them the best salespeople possible. IMO 3.0 was all about training advisors to figure out how to be a business owner.

And then, you know what I would say is what all of these stages had in common is it was a lot of education and a lot of training, which was all great and I think is great. And these things stack on top of each other. I don't think like because we're at 3.0, we dismiss what we did in 1.0 and 2.0. You need contracting and you need to understand the product. And now you need to understand how to build a bigger and better business to make more of an impact.

But what I believe and what we ushered in at Signal was IMO 4.0 when we released these new features that you had mentioned. I announced on LinkedIn pretty recently, which is — now it's not about — what I noticed was the biggest advisors had the shortest amount of time between learning something and implementing something. You talk to the biggest advisors, they are implementation machines. They go to conferences, they take three things away and they put it into their business within the next week. And they constantly are kind of like, you know, stacking those inches to make themselves just a little bit better all the time.

And what I noticed was like, the people who were kind of stuck or like, you know, had like the $10 million a year every single year, they had a real gap between, you know, the learning of the thing and the implementing of that best practice. And so what IMO 4.0 does, which I'm really excited about — all this kind of AI and agentic kind of elements of the world that we live in now — is that we can, as your IMO partner, actually kind of reach into your business and kind of like be alongside of you and actually help you implement these best practices instead of just talk about them and teach you.

You know, we still have events. We still put people on stage, great advisors with us that you get to learn from. But I think the difference is now there's software that can literally do these best practices for you in your practice, which is pretty remarkable. So that's kind of like thematically what we launched. Happy to go into kind of the specific features, but that's kind of like laying the ground for what we just launched and it was like late February.

Paul Tyler (10:17) Yeah, 4.0. Love it. Love it. And your firm is very different. I was out there, I guess it was last year, I think August. Detroit. I was kind of stunned at the number of engineers you have. Now I know, I think your co-founder was your CTO, right? You started with the tech.

Patrick Kelly (10:19) Yeah, Detroit, right? At our headquarters? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that's a good way to think about it. I always say, like in order for you to actually build something different, you have to have like different sets of people, your DNA has to be different. And if I looked around at all the other IMOs, it was generally like three marketers who started an IMO or like three advisors who started an IMO. And so it's a lot of like a big echo chamber, distribution people hiring more distribution people. And I really wanted a lot of diversity of thought when we started Signal. And if we're gonna be a technology company, you want to have technologists around, I think that makes sense.

So the co-founders — I have two co-founders. One is Jake Cohen, who has been a venture capitalist for most of his professional career, 15 years managing Dan Gilbert from Rocket. So Dan is the chairman and owns Rocket Mortgage. Jake has been managing Dan's money for the last 15 years deploying money on Dan's behalf and investing in startup companies. And it's funny because people say, like, what's a venture capitalist doing in the IMO world? How much does that person know about IMOs? And like the reality is a venture capitalist is actually a perfect background for IMO because what we do as IMOs is we try to help financial advisors build better businesses. Venture capitalists, sure they deploy capital to start businesses, but the best venture capitalists help entrepreneurs build businesses, which is exactly what IMOs do. They just all happen to be kind of in this financial advisory business. So that was a really unique person to add to the founding team and has added an immense amount of value to the company. It's been amazing working alongside Jake.

And then Kevin O'Hara, who's our CTO, has been kind of a, you know, he's an engineer by trade, you know, been a CTO, serial CTO, you know, three companies over. And it's, you know, the reality is, engineers want to work for other engineers and they want to work on creative problems and they want to kind of push the limits of technology. And Kevin is great at providing that to our team. And that's why there's such a strong engineering core and culture to our business — it's really kind of everything that Kevin has done on the technology side of the business.

And so maybe to put a bow around this — the way that I think about it is like literally we've got 130 people, half the people are IMO kind of traditional IMO functions and half the people are kind of technologists. Maybe just builders is a way to think about them. They're building solutions for financial advisors to make their lives and their businesses better.

Paul Tyler (13:07) That's great. Now, we'll get more into tech, but like, hey, you know, I'm a five million dollar a year producer. I'm not the 10. And I've been there for — I've been in the business for 10 years, been through two IMOs. You talked to me about those new features. Don't tell me about the AI. You mentioned good producers pick up a couple of good two or three things. Those features, what does it do for me as a business person running my practice?

Patrick Kelly (13:37) Yeah, you know it's a good question. I would say — so I can talk and touch on a few of the features we already have and then I'll touch on the new ones because I think the features from before like very much address the problem. They've gotten better over time, but there are things we launched. One was TruePay and Pay Later Marketing.

So one of the things — I was an advisor, we did about twenty million dollars a year in fixed index annuity production. And obviously we were stuck. You know, it's good, that's great production, it's definitely significant. But we did not get to move forward past that. There was a glass ceiling there for some reason.

We also, I would say, felt like we weren't making very much money even though we're doing twenty million dollars in production. And the reason why is we did two radio shows a month that we were doing, and we did four dinner seminars, sometimes five dinner seminars every month. So the amount of money we're spending on that was enormous and it outpaced our production.

And so what happened is we had to come out — you know, we do a dinner seminar, we got to pay for the mailers, we got to pay for the venue, we got to pay for the plate. And then we're probably 120 days from seeing revenue. So money's out the door. When do we actually earn revenue on that business? We'd have like $300,000 of receivables. And we're like trying to figure out how to push business through to get paid on something in order for us to go do more marketing. And so we'd stop and start our marketing in some months just because of cashflow constraints.

And so we built two things at Signal. One was Pay Later Marketing. We went to the marketing vendors and we said, like when Nordstrom's gets 10,000 shirts, they don't like pay for the shirts the day they receive them. They get net 90, they get net 60. They pay for the shirts with the money they make by selling the shirts.

And so we want to take that same concept to financial advisors. So at Signal, you can run marketing events without paying for them and you pay them 60 days or 90 days later. Pair that with another feature called TruePay, which means when you submit an application, you get paid on the same day you submit it.

So now you're taking that 120 day crunch time — and in some cases, it's literally zero days. Like there's negative crunch time. Where you could run an event, meet somebody, sit down with them, do a financial plan, sell them an annuity. And before the bill comes due on the dinner seminar, you just made 20 grand. You can actually pay for the dinner seminar and have some in the bank.

And so that working capital dynamic — like I always say the fastest way for you to go from 5 million to 10 million is something was working at 5 million. Double your marketing and you'll go to 10. The problem was always how do I make it work from a cash flow perspective? And so that's what we solved with those two features. And then we built a technology wrapper around those features so it all exists inside of our platform. So I can talk forever on this, but that's like very pointed on like how to go from 5 to 10 — just do more of what you're doing and kind of enabling it through working capital dynamics.

Paul Tyler (16:45) Yeah, so talk to me about like one or two features, one of those features in there. Like how would it, you know, what's the little thing it does, you know?

Patrick Kelly (16:49) Oh, that we launched? Yeah, I'm very in the weeds here.

So we released — I would say we released four major features. There's a couple that I'm very excited about. One was like five years in the making. So it's called One Click Annual Review. It basically takes a household and aggregates all of their data — life insurance, annuities, and managed money.

And if you're an advisor listening to this, you've been in this position, I imagine. You had a busy day, you're on phone calls, in meetings. You're ready. Your last meeting of the day, let's say, is a review. And you're like, oh, that's my easiest meeting of the day. No big deal, just walk in there and everything will be fine. I'll shake their hand, smile and tell them everything's great.

But you get to that meeting and you realize, oh, I don't have any materials. Like I got to go to the custodian's website. I got to go to this carrier, that carrier. I got to do the math because I'm like, did they make any withdrawals? Did they do an RMD? Why is there less money in here? What happened to the annual point? You're like asking all these questions, kind of like in a flurry. They're sitting in the lobby right now. And you're like, yeah, right.

Paul Tyler (17:54) That was the two-year crediting bucket you put your money in.

Patrick Kelly (17:58) You're like, shoot, that was two — so, you know, there's just all this stuff that happens in the spur of moment and you're busy and you're running a business and there's lots of competing priorities and you've got a client sitting in the lobby. So I've been there, I've done that. I created Excel spreadsheets to kind of do this. That's what most advisors we work with do. That's really what they do. They create an Excel spreadsheet, they stitch it together themselves. It doesn't look awesome, but at least you get the data, you know? And it takes a lot of time.

And so what we did was we spent five years getting all of this data, collecting all of this data. We launched it once about a year into the business, realized how hard it was. We shut it down six months in.

And we're like, we gotta get back to that. We're coming back here for this feature, we're gonna do this feature, but we gotta do it right. We can't get the data wrong. We gotta be clear about how we're doing calculations. Like there's a lot that goes into that feature. You know, we got 54 insurance carriers. We need 40 different data points. Like how do you stitch all this together reliably?

And so we really spent a ton of time. We hired a manual team at one point to pull down statements from carrier websites. We had like five people just fully dedicated to this. What saved the feature was AI. I don't know that we would have ever gotten this feature done. We had built kind of AI agents with tasks, specific tasks on the backend that go in and pull down different data points from carrier websites. Pull it all in, we scan statements that we pull from DTCC, we pull from carrier APIs.

Basically, it's a mosaic of like seven different things we're doing to kind of like really have this complete picture of the household. And then we wrap it up in a really nice report that's, you can kind of customize it a little bit and decide, you know, kind of, I want a more complex report or I just want a one pager, you know. So you can — but for the first time ever, you can click a button and in 30 seconds, you're going to get a report that's customized to your firm with your logo, your branding, and life insurance, annuities, managed money all in one place.

I mean you can get ready for a client review literally in probably sub 10 minutes because you know, look, you want to understand what's going on so you take a second to digest the information. But all of it is there at your fingertips and there's no more scrambling, no more cortisol shots — like you're just going, you're going in prepared. And like that feels super great. I mean, you know, it builds a lot of confidence.

Paul Tyler (20:17) That's a huge benefit. I know how complicated that is. I mean, you know, if you've got somebody working in your office, okay, they go to a couple of carriers, but to be able to do that for that many. So I'm kind of processing that in my head. So probably some of the —

Patrick Kelly (20:31) There's a book of business transfer process too. What if they wrote business, like, you know, Signal's been around for six years. What happened to all the business that you wrote prior to Signal? So like coordinating all of that and doing the book of business transfer, there's a ton that goes into it, Paul.

Paul Tyler (20:44) Okay, so you'd have to be hitting some APIs and some carriers. You'd probably have some weird feeds, like, you're getting email feeds from some of them, right?

Patrick Kelly (20:48) Yep.

Some of them are email feeds and then we like kind of extract it all out, you know, through like basically, you know, kind of an AI tool that kind of reads the emails or reads the PDF forms and we pull it all out.

Paul Tyler (21:06) It goes onto the website, can it go on? Right.

Patrick Kelly (21:08) It'll go on to websites. It can, you know, we're in the hierarchy so we can log in. So pull down, we can pull down PDFs, you know? So yeah, it's like, it's a mosaic. It's like, you know, there's seven different things you need to do. Like I always joke around and maybe people don't like me saying this, but like if people start talking about the DTCC, when they start talking about like in-force policy management, I'm like — you don't know what you don't know yet. You're like 4% to the solution because of just how much that was. That was the easy part. That was the thing that we did the first time when we launched it. You're like, there's actually four more years of work here in order to actually get this to be usable.

Paul Tyler (21:45) Yeah, well, you know, from us, we've been working really closely with IRI to come up with a set of standards to make it a lot simpler to do what you're doing, which — we have like 15 carriers we're working with right now with one of our distribution partners. They basically said, listen, open up your APIs to the standard.

Patrick Kelly (21:50) Yeah.

Bless.

Yeah, yeah.

Paul Tyler (22:09) Which I think will make it a lot simpler. I mean, I think what you've done is like this is tremendous. But like why should it be this? Yeah, but it's a hard one to do, you know. I've actually was on the phone with our team who has been working with this and you know, it's — to get a whole group of 40 carriers to —

Patrick Kelly (22:16) It's a pain. We definitely bled. We bled to get that one done. That was a big one.

Paul Tyler (22:32) — move to one standard is really hard because there's always going to be that carrier out there, the redhead or the orange cat, right, that's got some requirement here. But, you know, I think as an industry, we're making progress. But, boy, it takes a long time going through our associations and working like this. And it takes a lot of commitment.

Patrick Kelly (22:40) It's tough, it's definitely tough.

Basically, and you have to be — like there's gonna be a carrier that's not gonna move on and like that's okay. Like they'll catch up later, I guess, you know? So yeah, I think the standards would go a long, long way. And we've been seeing a lot like on the transfer side as well, you know, kind of in terms of the transfer of money. I think that's a big long pull in the tent for being able to process annuity policies faster. So yeah.

Paul Tyler (23:02) Yeah.

Well it is, you know, IRI is pushing and they've made success doing instant 1035 exchanges, not waiting 30 days to get the money. Explain that to a client, right? No.

Patrick Kelly (23:24) It doesn't really make any sense to a client.

Thank God the advisor built a ton of rapport during the process because at the end of it they have to sell a process that takes a month and a half. It's like a very, very strange thing. Yeah, I welcome all the standardization, it'd be great for us, be great for the industry. It makes everyone's lives a lot easier. And the customer, at the end of the day, it's like — so much, because there's so many players — like you've got the carriers, you've got reinsurance, you've got the IMOs, you've got the advisors, you've got the client. I think the further abstraction, the further you get from the client, the less you think about them. And it is kind of at the end of the day all about them. Like the whole entire lens should be through the client lens. And so like that's why standardization matters so much. You know, it's like if I can give the advisor better data, they can provide a better customer experience to the customer.

Paul Tyler (24:16) Well, exactly. I think everybody needs data. You need your clients. You need your CRM. You need your, you know, client files. You need some standard stuff to be able to work as a team. But then I need a layer that supports the way I work. You know, some of it's funding. Some of it's the business model like you're describing. Some of it's — but let's just sort of shift gears. You'd have to have been like under — like, I don't know, some island not to be watching all the stuff that's going on with AI, OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity. Yeah, no, no, no, yeah, listen, listen, I want a team, Pat, I want a team of seven people thinking 24/7 just about me. Like, what agent would not want — what rep would not want this?

Patrick Kelly (24:53) I've been seeing your stuff on LinkedIn, you've been experimenting quite a bit.

I think it is totally amazing. I think, you know, like what's gonna stop it? I think like, you know, I always talk about this with my team, like compliance and legal and you know, there's like those types of things can stop it. And those things are good. Like I actually think those things are good. I think — and probably I won't make any friends here in the compliance and legal departments, but — I think there's a bigger risk than the compliance and legal risk, which is the risk of obsolescence.

And so how do you pair those things together? How do you weigh all of that? And in my mind, it's about — by the way, it's so funny to be on a podcast talking about your general counsel, but like — Adam Lincolner on our team is phenomenal this way, which is like he views his role as how to enable things with the least amount of risk. Like how do I serve the business with the business taking on the least amount of risk to achieve the business outcome? Where I feel like I engage sometimes with folks where they are not thinking about — like the simplest way to de-risk this thing is to just say no. Like that ain't gonna do anything.

Paul Tyler (26:17) Right.

Patrick Kelly (26:21) But it's like, well, our goal is to be in business and our goal is to provide better customer experiences to make the world a better place. And so we need to be doing things. So how do we do things in like — it's like risk adjusted return. It's like, how can I do things with the right risk adjusted return? Cause I still have to get a high return. I just need to make sure I'm not taking on too much risk for every incremental percentage of return.

I feel like that's like the right framing for this — like this AI stuff in regulated spaces. You still need to comply with legal in a massive, massive way. But it'd be better if more departments in compliance and legal thought about how to enable this with less risk.

Paul Tyler (27:02) Listen, I couldn't agree with you more and I think — two fronts. One, you mentioned the regulation stuff. We've got a crazy law pending here in New York that is — the danger we're headed is that everybody hears AI and they think, we've got to add another layer of laws and rules. I'm a contrarian. I mean, we've got all sorts of laws around privacy, compliance —

Patrick Kelly (27:29) Right.

Paul Tyler (27:31) Data, you know, all sorts of restrictions around who can see what data. Misrep, you know, I can't pretend to be an insurance agent when I'm not a licensed agent. I can't pretend to be a financial advisor. What's really different here with an AI other than it's new?

Patrick Kelly (27:41) Right.

Yeah, I mean, that's definitely right. I mean, I would say there's like this very big fear about it becoming sentient, you know, like it being its own like thinking being, like self replicating kind of flywheel effect where it becomes smarter than humans and then like the only way it does its job well is if it starts deleting humans or something. So like that's like the train of thought — like Terminator. I, you know, I think that's like —

Paul Tyler (27:57) Yeah.

Patrick Kelly (28:18) Very, I don't think that's — I mean look, there's lots of smart people who say that can happen. I think it's — the people who say that's gonna happen are kind of talking their own book. Like they're talking about how great — because it's their solution who are talking about that kind of like — our thing is so powerful and so scary like we have to make sure that we do everything around AI safety. And like, I actually think —

You know, the biggest — and that's why like, I think Europe has totally shot themselves in the foot with all their AI regulation. Like, there's no — the race of AI is between the United States and China and Europe is not even being contemplated in the race. You know, and a lot of it has to do — now with the talent of the people, you know, not really at all. I think there's very talented people over there. I think it's way more about kind of the constraints that people are putting on those people. And so, yeah, I —

Paul Tyler (29:10) Yes.

Patrick Kelly (29:15) My view is that AI — like work is a very human endeavor. Like if we weren't all, if no humans existed, there'd be no work being done. Like, you know, dinosaurs didn't need work to be done. So like, I think that because work is a human thing, I think that people will always work, and that I believe that AI will just be a better way of getting your job done. It'll be a more satisfying way of getting your job done, because you'll accomplish more. Like, how great is it, the days where you just crush your to-do list and you feel like you got a ton of stuff done? I'm riding high, I'm feeling great. And I think you'll have more of those days with AI.

Paul Tyler (29:54) Yeah, I listen, I couldn't agree more. It's a — look, why am I doing this? I want to learn this, Pat. I think there's no — knowledge is power in this arena. And the struggles I find — come up tonight — I've run this in organizations for a while, you know, for as long as you have to in tech. If you really don't understand something, you end up fearing this stuff. Or, you say just saying no, because you don't —

Patrick Kelly (30:06) Yeah.

Yeah. Let's go. Just go use Claude and ChatGPT and Perplexity. Go use it. Go use Copilot and like — you'll kind of like get very familiar. To your point, like if you don't use it then like you're going to be afraid of it. And I really don't think there's anything — you know, I think look, I'm not saying we shouldn't have any AI safety. I think we should. But I just, I think there's a lot of practical ways to do it. I don't think it should be legislated.

I remember when DOL was going in place and they didn't know that IMOs existed so they didn't include them in the law. You know, I don't think those are the people who should be making the AI laws. You know, I think it's the people who actually understand the engineering of the AI.

Paul Tyler (30:52) Yeah.

Yeah, I will tell you, it is a little freaky when my OpenAI would start texting me because I wasn't talking to it.

Patrick Kelly (31:11) It is funny. Yeah, then you're like, wow, it is sentient. I mean, like, honestly, I have a Tesla, I recently got a Tesla and I have the autopilot and it is very weird to have the car drive you around. But then I'm like, this is amazing. You know what's so funny is how fast I changed my — I went from being surprised by how good it was to being frustrated that I couldn't do work in the car without my — I don't want to watch the road or — wait, I have to look at the road? I don't have to look at the road, I understand. It's very funny. How fast our expectations change, you know, so.

Paul Tyler (31:41) Ha ha ha ha.

It totally, totally does. Well, anyway, listen, Pat, this was great. As I said, all kinds of warnings could be dangerous to your business. You may want to do something different here after listening to Pat on the phone. I take no responsibility for any of this.

Patrick Kelly (32:01) Thank you.

I think like, you know, it's — this is the fun stuff. You want to make things, you want to make the world better. You want to make client experiences better. You want progress. And for us, like all this AI stuff for me is like a better opportunity to do all of that. And there was so many things that we weren't able to do at Signal because we didn't have the right tooling. Now with AI, we have the right tooling. It's like — the most excited I've ever been. I've been 15 years in kind of technology, at the intersection of technology and insurance really, and I've never been more excited than I am now.

Paul Tyler (32:47) Yeah. Well, anyway, listen, thanks for coming to the show. What's the best way for people to get in touch with you or talk to people about Signal?

Patrick Kelly (32:56) Best place is my LinkedIn. You can reach out to me, just Patrick Kelly at Signal Advisors. You can also check out Signal Advisors, our LinkedIn page. We're super active there and on Instagram. People can email me. My email address is just patrick@signaladvisors.com. Pretty straightforward and simple. So would love to hear from anyone who wants to chat. We're thinking about all of this stuff most of our waking hours.

Paul Tyler (33:21) Alright. Hey, great. Thanks to the listeners. Hope you liked it. Tell your friends, and most importantly, join us again next week for another great episode of our podcast.

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Thanks for listening to the LNA Hub. If you enjoyed the episode, follow the show wherever you listen and leave a quick review to help others find it. Until next time, keep testing, keep learning. Brought to you by Zinnia.

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LinkedIn Post

Patrick Kelly runs an IMO where half the company are engineers.

That's not typical. Most IMOs were started by three marketers or three advisors. Signal Advisors started with a venture capitalist who spent 15 years managing Dan Gilbert's investments and a serial CTO who attracts engineering talent by giving them creative problems to solve.

The result? Features like One Click Annual Review, which took five years to build because it pulls data from 54 insurance carriers through APIs, email feeds, website scraping, and AI-powered document extraction.

In this L&A Hub episode, Patrick explains:

• His IMO 4.0 thesis: implement best practices through technology instead of just teaching them
• How TruePay and Pay Later Marketing solve the working capital problem that keeps advisors stuck at $5M in production
• Why the gap between learning something and implementing it separates the biggest advisors from everyone else

Patrick's vision for technology-enabled distribution depends on carriers opening their data through clean APIs and standardized feeds. That's the kind of connected ecosystem Zinnia believes in.

🎧 zinnia.com/en/la-hub/patrick-kelly-reinventing-the-imo

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