You Have to Simplify to Multiply: Integrity's Tom Dempsey on Fixing the Buying Experience

James Caparosa (00:28) Hello, I'm James Caparosa, and we are here at the LIMRA Annual Conference, continuing the conversation around Life Insurance Awareness Month. Joining me today are my fellow hosts, Paul Tyler with Zinnia and Bill Nash, Vice President, Head of Member Relations and Sales at LIMRA. Paul, Bill, thanks for joining us. Bill, I'm gonna turn it over to you.

Bill Nash (00:48) Thanks, James. To dig into the experience of buying and selling life insurance today, I'm with Tom Dempsey, Chief Distribution Officer from Integrity. Tom, you see the buying process across health, wealth, and life, across many carrier partners, across a very broad agent and advisor network. Once the consumer decides to begin the process, where does it most often break down?

Tom Dempsey (01:13) It's a great question. First of all, gentlemen, it's good to see you. Thank you for having us here. So, there are friction points all over the place, but it actually starts, for me, and it'll vary. The answer is it will vary depending on whether we're talking about life, health, wealth, annuities. But ultimately, the buying experience breaks down if the consumer is asked, from an app perspective, to be overwhelmed with information. And by the way, the annuity experience is different than the life experience. The life experience is different depending on what carrier you're talking about. There's not a streamlined set of circumstances, so it's an inconsistent process, and a lot of the burden is put onto the customer. The agent obviously tries to make it a little more fluid. That is ultimately what they do. That's why they receive commissions: not just to make the sale, but to make the experience, if you will.

But ultimately it's on the front end of the experience. You see this a lot on the wealth side, where a lot of wealth advisors, honestly, have been accused of selling life insurance a handful of times in their career, and they will deny that accusation, as you know, having spent time there. But ultimately it's because you submit an application. First of all, it's not a simple process, right? So the more simple you can make the process, the better. The customer bears the burden of that. You could actually get some of the information wrong, which then goes NIGO, and then all of a sudden it's an even worse experience. You do get the application right, and it has to go into underwriting if it's a fully underwritten life insurance product. And obviously there's a 20 to 30 to 40 day lag before you actually get a result. If you were trying to make a more complex, complicated process in a world that is all about time and experience, I don't know if you could create one.

James Caparosa (03:00) Well, you know, on a related topic, you built a very unique platform bringing advisors together that are offering a wide variety of services: wealth, health, life insurance. You've been at the forefront of building a platform that really changes the experience you mentioned for the advisors and the consumers. If you look back at what you've accomplished, has it changed the economics? Has it made it easier for the consumer? Has it made it more for the agent? How do you net it out at this point?

Tom Dempsey (03:35) So the economics is the last thing that we actually think about. And to be frank, there are a lot of companies that actually charge you for the tech. We don't, frankly. And honestly, it started out because we were sincerely trying to get people the proper coverage that they deserved. And it really started on the senior side for us. The biggest disconnect was actually on the Medicare side. Still to this day, there are individuals writing paper applications for Medicare Advantage and faxing them into XYZ carrier. That's kind of embarrassing. If I were to send an intern out to try to buy a fax machine, they actually couldn't buy a fax machine today. Right. So it's an interesting buying experience.

So honestly, we were just trying to democratize the entire system. And how do you do that? You need an actuarial organization, because of the sort of underwriting that occurs in the field. On the Medicare side, you're actually asking for a lot of very detailed personal information. There are criteria on the front end that are requirements of the regulator. So everything we were building on the health side, we could actually copy and paste, Control-C, Control-V, onto the life side, and do the same thing on the annuity side. Our wealth buying experience is actually locked and loaded. We have a partner that helps us accomplish that. But honestly, it's the same idea. There's a front door, and it's a common experience on the front end. And then on the back end, the moving parts, the customer should not actually participate in. They shouldn't feel it at all. It should just be a seamless experience.

And so we've done that on the health side. I would say what we've built there is actually industry-leading. And again, we don't charge for the opportunity for an agent or an agency to use our technology, frankly, because the way we make money is when a person gets the protection that they deserve. And so that's really the driving philosophy for us. But it's great technology, and it actually helps a customer get what they deserve, right? It helps an agent have a more seamless experience. I can tell you today that people that use our technology on the health side write 79% more applications during an AEP, which is a short time period, eight weeks. That's a powerful stat.

And the purpose, by the way, on the front end is you create a system that is using all of the capabilities of today. The dawn of AI: we've been using it for five years in our technology. It basically helps line the agent up to the bullseye, so that they can get the answers to the questions right, more accurately and more consistently. So for example, when you're filling out a Medicare Advantage app, you have to get which carriers cover which prescriptions in which county, and you have to line this all up to the bullseye. If someone takes a prescription that can only be prescribed by a rheumatologist, people struggle to spell the prescriptions and the amount in the first place, but then our system actually locks in and says, okay, you've listed something that is typically prescribed by an inflammation doctor, typically a rheumatologist. Do you see a rheumatologist? I can't tell you how many times people go, yeah, I forgot about that one, right? And so if we miss that, then during open enrollment, come January first, everyone has the opportunity to change their mind. The more people that change their mind, the more disenrollment carriers actually have, right? Their persistency drops. And so all of our technology is also designed to help the carrier run a more efficient and effective organization, which means the price lowers. So when you ask about economics, it does improve the economics, but it improves the economics of the entire system.

Bill Nash (07:23) Love it. Yeah. Tom, let's stay there. On the experience side of things, you've obviously built a platform that is managing the experience, but you have a unique perspective, coming from career, captive agency, and independent distribution. Do you see a difference in how the channels manage that consumer experience, and do one or two things stand out over the other?

Tom Dempsey (07:45) Yeah, that's a great question. Every channel is different. We call them routes to market. Some routes to market specialize in working with financial institutions. Some are career, where they're buying leads, and some people don't buy leads. Some people are warm network or network marketing. But every single one of them interacts with the customer differently. And it really just depends on the starting point with the customer: how you obtained that customer, the information on the customer. So did you buy a lead? That's gonna be a little bit more cold, and you've got to work your way into that. If you have a warm market, where it's friends and family, obviously that one's gonna be very different, because you know a lot about those people to begin with. Actually, sometimes the hardest sale you can make in your life is to your own family.

And then there are other routes to market, frankly, like the financial institutions, where regardless of how they've met that individual, they have a little bit more robust process, whether it's a basic financial needs analysis tool or all the way through some of the more robust tools like eMoney or MoneyGuide. Some of our best organizations, the ones that do the highest rate of cross-selling and have the highest persistency, are the ones that keep their needs analysis super basic and keep the opportunity wide open, sort of the aperture open, for the agent or advisor to have the more robust conversation, based on how they feel the conversation is going. So if someone is more open or has a greater need today for a health product, they go down that path. If they have a greater need for a final expense product, for example, they'll go down that path.

So we honestly have a different subset of our 615,000 agents, which is what the Integrity network has today. Every single one of them recruits to a different style, works in a different manner. And all of them, except a small percentage, are 1099. So the other interesting thing about all of this is that you don't get to tell them what to do and when to do it. They actually get to do that themselves. That's the beauty of the United States of America: you can choose to be an employee or choose to be an independent agent. We work through independent agents, and that is who our infrastructure is built around. And every single one of them is going to go about their approach differently. But honestly, the best ones have a system, they have a process, and they do things in the way that works for them, but also ultimately wind up with the best results.

Bill Nash (10:05) So true. And if I'm picking up on one thing I heard you say a couple of times, it's a real strength in making the complex simple.

Tom Dempsey (10:12) 100%. Keep it basic.

Bill Nash (10:14) No doubt.

Tom Dempsey (10:15) Yeah, you have to simplify to multiply. I mean, that is pretty much any business.

Paul Tyler (10:19) Yeah. All right, Tom. I'm gonna make you Oz for a day.

Tom Dempsey (10:22) All right.

Paul Tyler (10:23) You get to wave a magic wand and have every carrier build one thing first. What's going to improve completion most for the consumer?

Tom Dempsey (10:35) It would be greater interconnectedness on the fundamentals on the front end of the process. You heard us talk early on about how there's just so much disconnection, where Carrier X has a different application process because they have different underwriting requirements, because they have different new business and case management, all the different components. I go into it as an agent. Now, if you're an agent, you're not gonna sell 40 carriers, but you have access to 40 carriers, right? Or in our case, like 93 life carriers, as an example. I can't name more than 20 of them, you know what I mean? So at some point there has to be some consistency. It's the one thing that the wealth side has done very well. Annuities are moving it forward. It's still disconnected in the middle part, but on the front end, at least there's some synergy. But at the end of the day, the more that we can make the experience better on the front end, which is greater interconnectedness. And you can call it what you will. I'm not a tech guy. But in the education world, if you have children, they have a Common App when you go and apply. You fill it out once and you literally click and send it to whoever you want. Until we get to that place in this industry, there's still going to be friction. You want to do more business, you've got to make it easier and you've got to make the experience better.

[12:03: brief crosstalk, inaudible.]

James Caparosa (12:05) That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So, good stuff. Great, Tom. Paul, any further questions? Comments?

Paul Tyler (12:12) Thanks for all your time. And I think reinventing the experience for the agents, and listen, we're working very hard to improve that connectivity at IRI and also here at LIMRA.

Tom Dempsey (12:25) I love it. Thanks.

James Caparosa (12:26) Yeah. Thank you guys. And a big thank you to Paul, Bill, and Tom for being our guest of honor.

Tom Dempsey (12:31) Thank you.

James Caparosa (12:32) I think we learned a lot about the client experience and how much it matters as we continue to move forward in Life Insurance Awareness Month, and what a big piece of the conversation that has become. So thanks for joining us.

Tom Dempsey (12:42) Yeah, we appreciate it. And thank you guys. Thank you to my friends at LIMRA for all that you do. And honestly, the more people we help get protected, the better off we're gonna be.

James Caparosa (12:51) Thank you, Tom.