The Value Is in the Conversation

Paul Tyler (00:01) Hi, this is Paul Tyler, and welcome to another great episode of the L&A Hub podcast. We've got a really timely episode today. I spent a good amount of time with my guest last week at a LIMRA and LOMA conference, and we'll get into that a little later. With me today is Tina Beckwith, Chief Marketing Officer for LIMRA and LOMA. Tina, welcome.

Tina Beckwith (00:33) Paul, thank you so much for having me. Yes — very timely conversation.

Paul Tyler (00:37) Before we start talking about the conferences, we were just at this Best Minds Symposium with a really fabulous group of people in Boston for two days. We'll get into that in a minute, and I'd love to compare notes with what I wrote down. But first, tell people a little about your background. You've got a really interesting job today — how'd you get here, and tell us more about the role.

Tina Beckwith (01:07) Absolutely. I've been in the industry for over 30 years — yes, I'll admit it. I've spent my career across the different insurance verticals, starting in property and casualty, into healthcare, then group benefits and life insurance. So I spent my career on the carrier side, to a large degree.

I joined LIMRA about five years ago to head up the marketing and communications division. By and large, the goal is to help members be more aware of the benefits available to them through the association — and that's where marketing and communications comes in. Philosophically, I believe in data-driven and digital-first marketing. We're on that journey, and it's been a great one so far. Happy to be here with you today.

Paul Tyler (02:09) Thanks. I can't help but notice your background in digital transformation — you did a lot of work consolidating information at some of the health and insurance companies you were at. What does that say about how LIMRA is thinking about the future of growth in the industry? I'm presuming they picked you for a reason.

Tina Beckwith (02:35) Yeah, absolutely. We know data-driven marketing is incredibly valuable. I often think of it almost like a data sandwich. You need data on the front end to inform your marketing and communication strategy. You execute in market. And then you need data on the back end to understand what happened and how you influenced it, based on your business goals.

Having that data available is incredibly important as we think about our ability to communicate relevantly to our own members — and as we contemplate the work we're doing with the Lifetime Income Initiative, where our mission is to help financial professionals and consumers better understand the value of annuities in creating retirement security.

Paul Tyler (03:35) Maybe talk a little more about that, since you mentioned lifetime income. Tell us about the Best Minds Symposium, and maybe the backstory with the Alliance for Lifetime Income. I thought what the Alliance was doing was great — we actually did a podcast once from one of the Rolling Stones events down in Atlanta. It was great. Ramsey Smith and a couple of people from our team were there. But tell us — describe the conference, and how did LIMRA and LOMA get there?

Tina Beckwith (04:11) I'll start with the background on the Alliance for Lifetime Income becoming part of LIMRA. They were established in 2018 and did a lot of great work, as you said, helping to shift the narrative about annuities in the market. We had the opportunity to acquire the assets attributed to that, and starting January 1st we took operational control of the program.

The Best Minds Retirement Symposium was born out of this work — understanding that it really does take a village. There were about 13 LIMRA and LOMA members engaged when the work transitioned into us. Now we've got 47 active on our advisory board, and that doesn't even represent all of the industry. The purpose is to bring everyone together — bring the executives of the industry together — because this is a category-level opportunity. Getting that enthusiasm and partnership, bringing the best minds together to help set our North Star for what we want to achieve as an industry.

Paul Tyler (05:43) I thought it was great. At one of the roundtables — I think it was a lunch session — it was great. I had Merrill across the table, Ameriprise across the table from me. I had LPL and JP Morgan on either side. Very interesting dynamic. And then two carriers — some great folks from F&G and from Sammons sitting there. We had a really interesting discussion, one you wouldn't necessarily get at many conferences. Maybe talk about how broad that was. You had distributors, major banks, broker-dealers, a number of carriers, but also a wide range of industry representatives — EBRI, NAFA. Walk us through how you thought about putting that room together.

Tina Beckwith (06:44) As you mentioned, we looked across the ecosystem at the points of influence and thought about the collaboration needed to connect the dots. So carriers, distributors, along with asset managers. We invited — and this is David Levenson, what a vision — our sibling trade association peers on the advocacy side, as well as our academics. We have the LIMRA Retirement Income Institute, a group of highly regarded academics in the field, to have a really intimate conversation.

As you pointed out, it wasn't just dialogue from the stage — it was the ability to network and bring forward tangible ideas and solutions. I don't know about you, but as folks were speaking I was taking notes on my phone. It was hard to keep up; there were so many great ideas. From what I've heard, folks really appreciated the ability to have a conversation, and we view this as just the beginning. This was the inaugural year, and I'll tell you — we held it last week, and we're already planning 2027.

Paul Tyler (08:17) Good. One of the comments that struck me was the discussion with David on stage with the heads of NAPA, the head of ACLI. Somebody said we're much more effective when we come with one single voice to policymakers. There were a number of policy discussions, and the "one voice" idea was interesting. If you think about how aligned the industry was a couple of years ago versus today, do you have any way to benchmark how consistent we are — when we speak to the market, when we speak to agents? How aligned is the message today?

Tina Beckwith (09:07) There's a large amount of momentum, but it's early days. We still have a lot of work to do. The way folks are coming together is what's meaningful. We have our advisory board, and then a couple of committees as well — because what we've said about this work is that while it's LIMRA-led, it's industry-powered. That's where we're really going to make progress.

Some of our carrier members in particular come top of mind when we think about how we get our message to the market consistently. So with the input of our members, we're creating marketing content and toolkits that can be evangelized to financial professionals and to consumers across the channels. We even had a member meeting last week where the annuity marketing team wanted to meet with us one-on-one and said, "We're going to build our marketing plan around using this content." That was a huge win — we're thinking, this could be a real opportunity. Not every organization will approach it the same way, but that's the beauty of it: carriers and distributors can take this content and this singular message out into the market consistently.

Paul Tyler (10:42) I want to go a little deeper on some of the comments you made at the meeting. I wrote notes around some of the policy discussions that were concerning. I mentioned this to you — I went on a ride with a bunch of my friends, we're all somewhere in that red zone, you know, fifty-five to mid-sixties, and we got to the coffee shop and had this really interesting discussion. A guy told me, "Should I start taking Social Security now? Because I just read the news that this thing is going bankrupt." I thought, this is going to be a long ride. If you think about the policy questions out front, some of it's a little frightening — the inability of Congress to make a decision, the financial issues with Social Security and other parts of the government. Where's the line between educating, making somebody want to take action on their own, versus scaring them to death — which we don't want to do, and regulation won't let us do?

Tina Beckwith (12:00) Right. The key, to your point, is awareness and education. We never want to use the fear factor. But there's a lot of conversation in the market about the future of claiming Social Security — what's the right age, how do you think about that? Those are really important conversations, particularly given that traditional employer-supported pensions really don't have prevalence in the market anymore.

That's where we as an industry have an opportunity to provide more of a personal pension, if you will, through annuities — creating certainty in the face of all this uncertainty. But the value is in the conversation. That's where financial professionals can really lean in, because it is a conversation: understanding an individual's goals, how they see themselves living in retirement, and then thinking about annuities as an asset class. Maybe it replaces some of the bonds, maybe it's something a little different. There's absolutely an opportunity to understand what a client wants to accomplish and talk about how they can get more security and peace of mind from an annuity — something you may not have in other parts of the market, because it's so dynamic and changing.

Paul Tyler (13:43) The "personal pension" framing is powerful for me. I actually ended up with a pension because I was working at a carrier that offered one, then tried to close it out a few years in. I had to do a little roll-the-dice calculation — how long am I going to stay, do I cash out? I rolled the dice. Where do you think the industry should focus in terms of words? Should we lean on the analogy, or should we say "annuity" is actually a good word — let me help you understand what an annuity does and is?

Tina Beckwith (14:32) I don't think we want to run away from the word annuity. It's what the market knows; people are familiar with the term. But, to your point, we have to make it tangible. One of my favorite phrases is that this is a journey. LIMRA is actually going to be working with our members on a consortia study in the coming months to understand how we can simplify the language from a consumer perspective — what will resonate, what will create clarity for consumers, which in turn helps financial professionals have the conversation.

That was one of the key messages I heard time and again throughout the day at Best Minds: simplicity, simplicity, simplicity. Yes, products can be complicated. But it's more about how we talk about the products. That's work we're going to do together. We need to keep evolving how we talk about annuities in a very simple way that clients will understand.

Paul Tyler (15:49) There was a great panel on marketing to women. Was that Suzanne Norman's discussion? That was great. Talk a little more about both the needs and how you actually talk to and address the women's market.

Tina Beckwith (16:10) Happy to. I actually recently did a podcast with Suzanne Norman that's coming out soon from LIMRA under the Lifetime Income Initiative, so if you're interested, please spend time with that as well. Women are in a unique place. Not only do women face unique challenges because we're often the caregivers — so our stream of income can be interrupted throughout our careers, whether you're taking time for childcare when you start a family or you're in the sandwich generation as your parents age. That earning isn't always linear.

In addition, there's going to be $54 trillion in this great wealth transfer, of which they believe 95% will go to women — often laterally, because they'll inherit from their spouses, and they'll also inherit from their parents. So there's a huge opportunity for financial professionals to help guide women, particularly when they lose their spouse. Often the relationship the financial professional had with the spouse is interrupted during that transition, when women are really vulnerable. So building the relationship with the woman can be incredibly valuable — understanding what their goals are, how things may have changed. And helping them feel confident, because that's really what they're looking for: someone who understands their needs and gives them confidence that they can maintain their goals and their lifestyle.

Paul Tyler (18:12) My personal opinion is that planning has to change toward a longer-term conversation. We're not giving books away anymore — it's not "I deliver you a static plan, sell you a product, and move on." It's got to be a longer-term engagement, which sometimes is out of sync with how we pay carriers or agents and advisors, and how we support these products later. So I think there's a really big opportunity here. Let me drill in on the simplification of language, because we've got to talk about AI. You had some real interesting comments there. I talked to Jason Fichtner a little bit about this. Meta actually did this brain-scan experiment — did you see this, Tina? They had people get their brains scanned while they looked at pictures and images and read text, and modeled the emotional response. Then they open-sourced it. So I downloaded it, set it up, and started running insurance ads against it — life insurance. I thought, how do you talk about mortality? What's the least frightening way to talk about someone's mortality in these ads? I took some real insurance company ads — I won't say which — and ran all these variants. The scariest part, Tina, was the jargon we use. All the regulatory jargon. That was scarier than death. So tell people what you found out about the whole myth-busting issue we have now with AI because of the content we put out.

Tina Beckwith (20:16) Happy to — and what you just shared doesn't surprise me at all. Think about not only the terms but the acronyms alone, and the impact they have on how folks perceive us. The struggle is real, as we say. So, myth-busting. From a marketing and communications perspective, it's long been a common approach to talk about the top 10 myths or misconceptions, identify what they are, and provide the facts as an alternative.

But AI is picking up this content that's out there publicly, and because the language is out there around myths, it automatically translates that into more of a negative sentiment — even though the message is positive and wants to tell the story of what's true and bust those myths. So we need to think differently as AI becomes a bigger part of our world. I talk to our CMOs and others in the industry all the time, and what we're seeing is that AI's role in search — really driving individuals to their websites — is changing rapidly. We believe there's an opportunity, through the Lifetime Income Initiative, to think about the language we put out there at the category level, to simplify and help consumers better understand why they should care.

We as an industry have been talking about accumulation for 40 years. Consumers focus on accumulation, and then all of a sudden they have to flip a switch when they retire to decumulation. Really? What does decumulation mean? We use that word, but it's just about how you spend money and make sure you don't run out. These conversations are so important. It truly is "have a conversation" and talk in plain language. That's got to be the key to how we help consumers understand how they should think about these needs long term.

Paul Tyler (22:54) It's interesting. I've seen this on our B2B site — something like 70% of our traffic is coming in off Gemini. These are insurance executives doing AI searches and coming to our product. And on the PolicyGenius side — we own PolicyGenius — it's fascinating. People are calling in, and we'll see how these models go through phases of what they recommend for products, and they keep coming in with the same concept. So they're doing their research, then talking to a person. Right now the conversions are really high on leads coming through AI — people trust AI. Do you think AI is going to be that trusted advisor? We don't think about it as search; we've got to think about it as: how do we educate these AI engines to help facilitate those conversations?

Tina Beckwith (24:00) I think it's going to play an increasing role in how people search for information before they're ready to make a phone call to a financial professional. We've seen this trend for a while — consumers use search or social media; TikTok and YouTube are huge sources of information when they want that low barrier to entry to get started. AI is going to continue to play an increasing role there. So how do we use all these tools to empower consumers to take that first or second step — to call their financial professional and find one? If the first step is doing a little research on their own and preparing them to make the outreach so they can get that personal consultation, that's so important.

Paul Tyler (25:07) We're moving into an interesting time. We've had Annuity Awareness Month, Life Insurance Awareness Month. Tina, should these be months, or should this be an always-on type of campaign that's being honed consistently by the industry?

Tina Beckwith (25:29) Could not agree more — and that's what we're doing with the Lifetime Income Initiative. We recognize Annuity Awareness Month because it's a great opportunity to put a mark in the ground and drive a consistent message. But yes, it's going to be an always-on approach so we can reach consumers when they're ready. What's that phrase — when the student is ready, the teacher appears. We need to do that. We need to be there whenever anyone is getting ready.

As we say with our Peak 65 moniker, over 11,000 individuals are turning 65 every day. Those are clearly boomers entering their retirement phase. And Gen X is next. Given the independence of Gen X — I can say that, I'm one myself — we can help enable them to make their decisions. They often talk about their independence: "I can get it done myself." That may be true, but they won't get it done to the best of their ability without the consultation of a financial professional. So we want to wrap that messaging together for both the boomers and the Gen Xers who are rising retirees.

Paul Tyler (27:07) How are you thinking about the materials and support you provide members in an age of — our industry's conservative, but I put a chatbot on my site. That's a whole different thing now. It's not just an email template; I need data, a source of truth my chatbot can use that's been proven out by the industry association. How are you thinking about the types of support you'll provide, especially with the Lifetime Income Initiative, that would support AI- and gen-AI-powered marketing?

Tina Beckwith (27:47) We're building that out now. With 2026 being our first year of standing this up, we're taking a crawl-walk-run approach. However, our world is impatient, and we're going to be focusing on AI. To your point, we're leveraging insights and research from the Retirement Income Institute, as well as our voice and our brand — a lot of the value comes from its independence. We're an unbiased source our members can leverage to create content.

So we're looking at a really integrated, multi-channel approach that, as I said, is digital-first, because that's how our world operates. We're continuing to test and learn. Podcasts like this are absolutely one opportunity and channel, but there's a lot more we can do. Our members are informing it — they're telling us what they need so we can deliver on the highest priorities that help us create this holistic voice in the market.

Paul Tyler (29:07) I've got one big closing question. Three years from now — Lifetime Income Initiative — paint a picture of success for what you're driving here.

Tina Beckwith (29:25) Success is that the market has been softened. Consumers are more receptive to annuities when their financial providers offer or suggest them. Financial professionals are more comfortable having the conversations around the value of annuities and driving that forward. And for all of our members, it's that we continue to lock arms in terms of what we can accomplish for the category — to help more Americans secure their retirement.

Paul Tyler (30:04) This was great. For any carriers not involved — is there any carrier in the US not involved in LIMRA and LOMA? I can't imagine. There may be a handful.

Tina Beckwith (30:16) Well, everyone — all the members who are part of LIMRA, which is the vast majority of the market — has the benefit of this work. We're driving it through, and as I said, 47 of our members are actively participating in the advisory board. That does not preclude any other member from capitalizing on the work we're doing together.

Paul Tyler (30:47) This has been great. Thanks for the time. What's the best way for anyone listening to get in touch with you and learn more about what LIMRA and LOMA is doing?

Tina Beckwith (30:57) To get in touch with me personally, you can reach out on LinkedIn — Tina Beckwith. You can also visit our website, limra.com. We have a financial professional site as well as a consumer site. So please go out there, access all the information, and take advantage of it. The more the industry capitalizes on the content we're creating, the more progress we'll make.

Paul Tyler (31:31) Excellent. All right, Tina, thanks so much. Thanks to our listeners — be sure to subscribe to our show, tell your friends, leave us a review, and most importantly, join us again next week for another great episode of the L&A Hub.

Tina Beckwith (31:45) Thank you, Paul.