The L&A Hub

Tom Dempsey sees the life insurance buying process from an unusual vantage point. As Chief Distribution Officer at Integrity, he oversees a network of 615,000 independent agents with access to 93 life carriers, after years running captive distribution at Transamerica and World Financial Group.
Recorded live at LIMRA Annual 2026 with Nasdaq's James Caparosa and LIMRA's Bill Nash, Dempsey walks through where the process breaks: applications that overwhelm consumers, NIGO paperwork, and underwriting lags of 20 to 40 days. He describes agents who still fax Medicare Advantage applications, and explains how Integrity built a free front-end platform, running AI for five years, that helps agents write 79% more applications during the eight-week AEP window. He shows why the best agents keep needs analysis basic and the aperture wide open, and why every route to market meets the customer differently.
Asked to wave a magic wand, Dempsey picks one fix: a Common App for insurance, filled out once and sent to any carrier. Listeners come away with a clear picture of what friction costs the industry and where carriers should build first.

Life Happens has spent 16 years building the Insurance Barometer Study with LIMRA, the industry's most-used read on how Americans think about life insurance. Executive Director Brian Steiner joins Paul Tyler and LIMRA's Chris Curran, Head of Global Brand and Marketing, live from LIMRA Annual 2026.

Steiner traces how the Barometer started and why carriers lean on it for their own marketing. He puts the gap in plain numbers: despite recent gains in life and annuity sales, about 100 million Americans still lack coverage. He explains why misinformation on social platforms and AI chatbots makes trusted third-party voices more important, and why Life Happens aims to get people to think, feel, and act, with action as the hard part. A new Life Happens study adds a gut punch: people spend more time on social media in a week than on their financial plan all year, and would rather clean out the garage than talk about coverage.

Steiner closes with a case for young professionals to lock in insurability early, grounded in a personal story about his mother. Listeners will hear why awareness alone never closes the gap.

Bob Jurgensmeier spent most of his career on the actuarial side before becoming CEO of Ameritas, and he now serves on the LIMRA board. Live from LIMRA Annual 2026, he joins Paul Tyler, Nasdaq's James Caparosa, and LIMRA Chief Marketing Officer Tina Beckwith to answer a simple question: why does the gap exist?

His actuarial answer points to demographics: an aging population, later marriage, delayed parenthood. His research answer offers more hope. Most uninsured Americans already believe they need coverage, so the industry has no messaging problem. It has a reach problem. Too many people with the need never get asked. Jurgensmeier explains how a mutual carrier weighs its next investable dollar, why the workplace offers a largely untapped door built on employer trust, and how regulatory and privacy limits complicate cross-selling from dental and vision into life.

He calls affordability the biggest myth of all, since young and healthy buyers often guess the cost at ten times the real price. Listeners will hear a CEO's case that the industry already has willing buyers and simply needs to show up where they live, work, and scroll.

Chris Blunt has spent 40 years in the industry, most recently leading product across life, annuities, institutional, and distribution before becoming CEO of Peak Altitude Equity. Live from LIMRA Annual 2026, he joins Paul Tyler, Nasdaq's James Caparosa, and LIMRA's Sean Grindall to talk about the product side of the gap.

Blunt names the core mismatch: the industry grew through larger premiums from affluent clients and left the middle market behind. There, premiums run smaller and have to do more, and process matters as much as product. He makes the case for living benefits, which the industry has gotten bored of talking about, and for combination products that reassure buyers their premiums won't go to waste. He argues the industry has failed to grow its agent force for 20 years and describes part-time paths that work more like Uber than a black car service.

Blunt also shares a personal story about losing his brother, whose final thoughts centered on leaving a legacy for his two daughters. He closes with a call for cohesion: stop fighting over premium share and grow the pie. Listeners will hear why the middle market needs a different product, a different process, and a bigger agent force.

Over two days on the floor of LIMRA Annual 2026, Paul Tyler and Nasdaq's James Caparosa sat down with carrier CEOs, distribution leaders, and technologists, joined by hosts from LIMRA and LOMA, to ask one question: why does the protection gap persist, and what closes it? This special episode stitches the best of those conversations into one argument.

Ameritas CEO Bob Jurgensmeier opens with the diagnosis: people know they need coverage, but nobody asks them. Integrity's Tom Dempsey and Simplicity's Scott Truka follow the buyer into a process that varies by carrier and still takes 20 to 40 days, and they push for connected front ends and faster underwriting. Rob TeKolste of Sammons says the fundamentals haven't changed, but consumer expectations have. John Hancock CIO Kartik Sakthivel calls legacy systems an albatross and warns that great AI never comes from poor data. Peak Altitude's Chris Blunt argues that in the middle market, process matters more than product, and shares a personal story about why the work matters.

LIMRA and LOMA CEO Dave Levenson closes with a carpe diem call: keep it simple, focus on the middle class, and solve the gap together.

North Dakota Insurance Commissioner Jon Godfread raised his hand to serve as vice chair of an NAIC innovation task force in his first months on the job. When the chair resigned, the brand-new commissioner suddenly led the group that grew into the NAIC's work on AI governance.

Paul Tyler sits down with Godfread to unpack how regulators actually think about AI. Godfread explains why he favors principles, governance, and exams over prescriptive new laws, and how twelve states now pilot AI examinations built with industry input. He shares a new headache: consumers filing complaints drafted by chatbots that cite the wrong statutes, and refusing correction. That problem pushes regulators to rebuild their own websites as a source of truth for AI agents.

The conversation ranges across the state-by-state patchwork in Colorado, New York, and Connecticut, the coming federal data privacy fight, North Dakota's data center debate, and how AI could sharpen financial and solvency oversight. Godfread closes with blunt advice for carriers: get moving, start with low-risk back-office work, and call your regulator before you launch.

Dennis Martin — President of Individual Life and Financial Services at OneAmerica Financial, an actuary in the industry since 1991 — argues that the trillion-dollar coverage gap is a need statistic, not a demand statistic: life insurance demand is generated by producers, and producers have been the scarcest resource for twenty years. He frames the pandemic as "the ultimate accelerator," separates going electronic from going truly digital (the data layer between legacy systems and the business), makes the demographic case for long-term care as a huge market with almost no competition and under 10% penetration, and holds that AI is fuel for the business rather than the business itself. Closes with career advice: bring your running shoes to work, walk the building, stay curious.

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.

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.

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.