The L&A Hub

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 kee...

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 ...

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...

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...

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 ex...

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 M...

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...

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...

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 th...

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. That arc turns out to be exactly the right background for what he's doing now.

In this episode, Ryan walks through the three models AmeriLife uses to partner with carr...

Wei Chen is an Associate Professor at the University of Connecticut School of Business and co-leader of the Digital Frontiers Initiative. Over the last three years he's made generative AI his mission — graduate courses, executive workshops, a textbook, and now a business novel modeled after The Goal and The Phoenix Project, set inside an insurance company.

His central argument: every serious conversation about AI and the w...

This isn't a one-guest show. Paul brings together three of the industry's sharpest voices on retirement income — Joe Jordan, Ted Rosedale, and George Bain — for a roundtable on what's actually changing in retirement planning, and what isn't.

Joe Jordan frames the demographic shift hiding underneath every tech headline: the U.S. has more centenarians than any country on earth, the worker-to-retiree ratio is heading to...

Brian Poppe has done something rare in L&A: he started as an actuary, founded Mutual of Omaha's innovation practice as the entire department of one, served as Chief Data Officer, and now runs the company's life insurance P&L. That breadth is the lens for this conversation.

Brian walks through his four-phase AI adoption framework — awareness, helping individuals, redesigning processes, and AI talking to AI — and g...

Branislav Nikolic spent nine years at CANNEX, wrote a PhD dissertation on retirement and annuity optimization, and was doing machine learning back when it was still called machine learning. Today he runs the insurance practice at The Index Standard — the independent firm rating, forecasting, and benchmarking the 150+ indices feeding America's FIAs, RILAs, and IULs.

In this episode, Branislav explains why eight out of every ten...

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 m...

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. In this episode, James breaks down what AI is actually doing to startup teams right now: one founder quietly let go of two engineers, another is doubling down on senior talent, and a third expanded h...