Life Accelerated

Where did the life insurance industry go wrong? To the average consumer, it's perceived as more about death – than life.

John Hancock is on a mission to put the "life" back in life insurance. Sporting key partnerships with Apple and other tech companies, they're helping customers live longer, healthier, better lives.

VP, Head of Behavioral Insurance at ManuLife Lindsay Hanson joins Life Accelerated to reveal how they've innovated with both amazing organizations and their own customers to bring about big change.

You'll also learn how customer engagement will change in the future and how to secure personal health data.

Resources:

GRAIL Release

Vitality Page

Insurtech is no nascent industry. After ten years investing in the most innovative companies, Joel Albarella is optimistic about the present and future of life insurance.

One of the industry's first venture capitalists and SVP & Head of New York Life's NYL Ventures, Albarella unearths the secrets of innovation and how New York Life is growing despite being around for more than 100 years.

You'll also learn why the recession is an opportunity for the industry and what fishing has to do with innovation.

No one expected century-old life insurance companies like Principal and Mutual of Omaha to succeed through the pandemic. Yet, they rolled with the punches–and even thrived.

Life Accelerated's Anthony O'Donnell is joined by Kim Pfiffner, Chief Information Officer at Principal and Brian Poppe, Chief Data Officer at Mutual of Omaha. Who reveal their secrets to success and predict future trends in the insurance industry.

You'll also learn why leadership is so important in the age of remote work, how agile is the solution to speed and risk, and why partnerships are the keystone of successful product and marketing strategies.

The war for talent is over. And talent won.

National Life has had a double-digit growth rate over the last decade—unheard of in the life insurance world. And CIO Nimesh Mehta attributes their success to a strong dedication to their people and a structure called teaming.

Nimesh Mehta joins us on Life Accelerated to share how they've adopted technology faster than anyone else in the industry. He also reveals how to create a human-centered digital strategy, how to use it to remove friction from the buying process, and how National Life leveraged it to grow so quickly.

What do you do when you don't have legacy systems and the history of a longstanding company to build your digital transformation? According to Alyssa Arellano, Head of Technology Strategy at Equitable's employee benefits division, you use it as an opportunity to be agile, adaptable, and open to the future.

Equitable's employee benefits division started in 2015, and now in 2022, they cover nearly 700,000 people. Alyssa shares her 6 verticals for looking at customer interactions and how those dictate Equitable's technology and digital transformation strategy. Listen in to hear how a newer company is thinking about technology differently to best serve its customers.

"Our biggest competitor isn't another carrier—it's procrastination."

Those aren't words you hear from a life insurance leader very often, but Kevin Cummer and Nick Rohan from CUNA Mutual have been on a journey to break down barriers in their industry.

To focus on customer centricity, CUNA Mutual simplifies the process to obtain life insurance and leverages technology to better serve their customers. It sounds easy, but it hasn't always been this way. Listen in as Kevin and Nick discuss how their teams have worked together to help build an innovative system to improve the customer experience.

From MassMutual and New York Life to Protective and Mutual of Omaha. The Life Accelerated Podcast thus far has been a wealth of knowledge from leaders on the bleeding edge of digital transformation in the life insurance industry.

Now, we look back at the top 5 digital transformation initiatives shaping the modernization conversation, including customer-driven change, cloud migration and talent recruitment.

For a deeper dive into these initiatives and the core principles these leaders cite as imperative for digital transformation, read the latest eBook from Equisoft.

"Software is eating the world," Marc Andreesen claimed in 2011. He was right.

Technology is intertwined in nearly every facet of life insurance today. But Protective's COO Cissy Williams takes a different perspective: We can't forget about the human element.

In her many experiences in stay-at-home motherhood and various professional roles throughout the industry, she's learned that empathy is most important in creating products and services that people actually want and use. In this episode, you'll learn how to balance the human and tech elements to improve both the employee and customer experience.

Penn Mutual is an almost 2-century-old business—and they have the innovation and modernization to back up their longstanding success. But it doesn't come without learning curves and experimentation.

Enter Greg Driscoll, the COO of Life and Annuities. From moving to cloud services to implementing new applications and data management practices, Greg is innovating on a 175-year-old original data company's data management and utilization strategy to prioritize not only clients but also your employees. Listen in to hear how the state of technology today is enabling Penn Mutual to revitalize its 175-year-old business promise—creating a healthy life insurance business and industry.

It's hard enough to plan for tomorrow. What does the future hold for the life insurance industry? And how can we reach new generations who are skeptical?

Ellen Carney, Principal Analyst at Forrester, lives in the data. In this episode of Equisoft's Life Accelerated, she walks through the major risks facing the industry, how to progress and plan for the future, and what to prioritize as the consumer, product and market rapidly changes. Learn what's next and how to act now.