The L&A Hub

Zinnia
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  • Business

Welcome to The L&A Hub — where innovation in life insurance and annuities gets 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 in the life insurance and annuity industry. Learn what worked, what didn’t, what they learned — and what’s next. New episodes weekly. The Life and Annuity Hub. Brought to you by Zinnia.

  1. 1d ago

    Katherine Dease - Why should an Annuity Be Harder Than a Mutual Fund?

    Katherine Dease has one mandate at the Insured Retirement Institute: modernize the annuity industry. She has spent her career on the vendor side of that problem, with product leadership roles at Ebix, now Zinnia, and Insurance Technologies. That experience is exactly why she stopped trying to solve it platform by platform. Her thesis: as long as every provider speaks its own dialect, integration stays expensive and annuities keep failing to show up in the tools advisors actually use. The proof point is paperless replacements. Athene, Jackson, Sammons, and Prudential went first, taking on the risk of going first with the DTCC and IRI, and took carrier-to-carrier replacement business from an average of 18 days to 24 hours, a 94% reduction in cycle time. Twelve carriers plus the DTCC are now live, more than 50,000 transactions have settled, and Katherine expects close to 30 carriers by year end. Advisors are calling their carriers to ask what just happened. She also unpacks the can-sell and training standards that cut NIGOs 40% at one carrier, what’s next in the book-of-business API work, and how a 48-hour hackathon put four solutions into production. If you want the playbook for changing an industry without waiting for consensus, this is it.

  2. Aug 28

    Eric Sondergeld - We Develop Products in Reverse Order

    Eric Sondergeld — Managing Director at Greenwald Research, an actuary (ASA, CFA) who ran market research at LIMRA for years before moving to custom research across life, annuities, and distribution — opens this episode 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 still 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 clear-eyed read on synthetic respondents and AI moderation — where they help, and where "just because AI can, doesn't mean you should." A grounded, occasionally moving case that the next edge in L&A is experience and evidence, not another me-too product.

  3. Aug 21

    Sean O'Donoghue - Your AI Strategy Is a Document — The Operating Model Is the Difference

    Sean O'Donoghue — Chief Digital, AI & Technology Officer at Security Benefit and Eldridge Wealth Solutions — spent thirteen years in professional sports, media, and entertainment (DreamWorks, Madison Square Garden, Major League Soccer) before two stretches in insurance, and he brings a hard-won conviction from that world: every minute of attention has to be earned through experience, and the technology has to become invisible while you deliver it. In this episode he makes the case that most insurance AI stalls not on the technology but on the operating model — the difference between a document and a system where everyone already knows who decides, who builds, how it's governed, and how data flows without calling a meeting. He reframes straight-through processing as table stakes and names the real next battleground "the conversation around the button": surfacing the consequences of a transaction just in time, before a customer discovers them on a statement three months later. He moves employees from "human in the loop" to "human above the loop," revives Michael Hammer's business process reengineering for the AI era ("we don't need to do stupid things faster"), and insists governance is a framework, not a committee — with the advice boundary built into infrastructure, never left to a model in a prompt. Along the way: why he'd never rebuild what Zinnia does, and what an AI-native retirement carrier looks like three years out.

  4. Aug 7

    Frank Chechel - The Robots Took All the Easy Cases

    Frank Chechel — VP and Head of Individual Life Underwriting at Gen Re, and an actuary who "fell into" underwriting a decade ago when a boss asked him to build an underwriting R&D team — makes the case that after a hundred years, underwriting is only just scratching the surface. He and Paul trace how COVID flipped accelerated underwriting from a nice-to-have experiment into an overnight mandate, why wellness programs went quiet during the pandemic and are now roaring back, and how to think about AI in three distinct layers: predictive models, generative summarization, and the still-early agentic frontier. Frank is refreshingly blunt about the limits — a document summary that's 95% accurate is "a good way to get fired," and the same alcohol-related case put in front of five underwriters can produce five different answers. His through-line: the robots are taking the easy declines and clean preferred risks, which makes the human underwriter's job harder, not obsolete. The future underwriter lives in the gray zone and is fluent in data. Along the way — standing-room-only GLP-1 webinars, why bad data management hamstrings even the best data scientists, and Gen Re's own Claude pilot building a unified underwriting knowledge base.

  5. Jul 24

    Josh Hershman - Break Some Dishes

    Josh Hershman has done something almost no one in insurance regulation has done: he's been a private attorney, a deputy commissioner, the executive director of an open-source data standards project, and the CEO of a life insurance company — all before Governor Lamont named him Connecticut's Insurance Commissioner. That resume gives him a vantage point on AI that most regulators don't have, and he uses it. In this episode he explains how Connecticut is already running AI inside the department (a state Copilot license, financial-exam document review, letter drafting) and why the hardest part is change management, not technology. He borrows the EU's tiered, consumer-impact framework to argue carriers should "break some dishes" on internal use cases while moving carefully on anything that approves or denies a claim — but still moving. He and Paul get into why annuity illustrations are the single most tailor-made AI use case in the industry, how McCarran-Ferguson and the NAIC's slow "model act" machinery actually shape the rules, and why the word "testing" in the AI model bulletin is leaving carriers frozen. Listeners come away with a regulator's actual map of what to build fast, what to build carefully, and what to bring to a statehouse versus the NAIC.

  6. Jul 17

    Chris Orestis - There's No Account With Your Name On It

    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 and 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.

  7. Jul 10

    Jeff Tulloch - Why Financial Wellness Education Never Worked

    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 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.

  8. Jun 26

    Tina Beckwith - Marketing Lifetime Income in the Age of AI

    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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About

Welcome to The L&A Hub — where innovation in life insurance and annuities gets 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 in the life insurance and annuity industry. Learn what worked, what didn’t, what they learned — and what’s next. New episodes weekly. The Life and Annuity Hub. Brought to you by Zinnia.

Information

  • Creator
    Zinnia
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    24
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Zinnia
  • Show Website
    The L&A Hub