The L&A Hub

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...

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...