The L&A Hub
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.
Episodes
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 carriers o...
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 workforce s...
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 toward zero, and S...
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 gives a refre...
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 FIA d...
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 most important gene...
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 her tea...
Patrick Kelly, Co-Founder and CEO of Signal Advisors, breaks down his IMO 4.0 thesis — the idea that modern IMOs should implement best practices through technology, not just teach them. From founding RepPro to building an AI-native IMO in Detroit, Patrick shares what it took to create features like One Click Annual Review, TruePay, and Pay Later Marketing that are changing how advisors run their businesses.
Nick Gerhart — former Iowa Insurance Commissioner, insurtech investor, and now COO of Homesteaders Life — makes the case that smaller carriers can finally outmaneuver the big guys. He talks about building adjacencies around pre-need insurance, why the AI governance framework needs rethinking, and why his single piece of advice to every insurance professional is the same: don't do nothing.
Cally Myhrum, founder of Lotus Fertility Insurance, shares how a personal experience led her to build the first fertility protection product embedded in life insurance. With IVF costing $60-70K and no individual coverage options, she's creating a $265 billion blue ocean — and carriers are paying attention.
Michelle Gordon, COO of Axonic Insurance, reveals how a startup grew to $2.1B in issued annuities in its first year — with its own cloud-built policy admin system and 125 employees. Plus, her passionate case for why the SEC's 1987 ruling on financial planning is harming American retirees and the insurance industry alike.
Andrew Barnett, VP of Technology Innovation at FIG, shares how a stint in minor league baseball led him to one of the most forward-thinking tech teams in insurance distribution. He breaks down FIG's work at the IRI hackathon — including an AI agent that calls clients to gather application data — and makes a compelling case for why the industry needs to stop planning to 2028 and start shipping in weeks.
Moshe Golomb, CEO of Juice Financial, tackles the $10 trillion check problem still plaguing insurance. After 26 years digitizing payments across retail and banking, he's bringing Uber-like transparency to insurance disbursements — from death claims to annuity payments to international stablecoins. Plus: why 20% of insurance costs are fraud, and how open banking is changing the game.
Darren Rowe, CEO of Kadance, explains how his precision health management program is changing life insurance from a death benefit into a living benefit. Learn how genetic testing, cancer navigation, and pharmacogenomics are being embedded into life insurance policies — and why Nationwide bet on this approach.
Paul Tyler speaks with Ash Sawhney, President and Chief Revenue Officer of Zinnia, about the transformative changes in the life insurance and annuity sectors. They discuss the evolution of underwriting, the impact of technology and AI, and the entrepreneurial journey within the insurance industry. Ash shares insights on how Zinnia is digitizing and automating processes, the challenges faced by new businesses, and the future of unde...
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