The Future of Insurance – Paul Tyler, CMO, Nassau Financial Group

Paul Tyler serves as Chief Marketing Officer for Nassau Financial Group where he leads the marketing strategy, digital channels and innovation activity. Paul drives the branding of the insurance companies and affiliated asset management companies.

He built a direct-to-consumer channel for Nassau Re. In addition, he launched Nassau Re/Imagine, an Insurtech-focused incubator based in Hartford. Prior to his role at Nassau Re, he worked at Fidelity & Guaranty Life, MetLife in a variety of roles in strategy, marketing, operations, technology, sales, and compliance. He earned his A.B. from Princeton University and his J.D. from Cornell Law School.

Highlights from the Show

• Earlier in Paul's career, he was part of the demutualization of MetLife, and he reflected on where they thought the industry was going back then, which was a story of consolidation and few, if any, new insurers; they also saw the stock market as the main source of financing
  • In fact, there have been new insurers, including Nassau, which was founded in 2015
  • Also, Private Equity and other sources of capital have become far more impactful and prevalent than they thought
• Paul joined as CMO to help build the company and drive transformation to the Cloud
• Nassau has also been very active in helping to develop the startup community in their home city of Hartford, CT
  • There was a push from several organizations and the government (city and state) to drive innovation in Hartford when Paul arrived in 2016
  • They build startup bootcamps, competitions and more
  • Nassau opened up part of their offices to startups to help incubate them and connect them with other potential customers
• Post-pandemic, they've focused more on startups that Nassau could directly work with
• A lot of what they're seeing in their core of Life & Annuities is similar to what P&C focuses on despite all the perceived differences between the two spaces
  • Life & Annuities have lower transaction volume, but the duration of the product adds a lot of complexity
  • They're thinking about compliance, using ML to understanding your business, how you deal with legacy mainframes that still have business on them
• We talked about the issues in Healthcare and Health Insurance, and the impact on so many aspects of the economy
• Medicare Supplemental and Advantage plans are actually really tied to retirement planning because of the financial impact they have on your finances, so Nassau is working on this space, too
• The regulation and inter-dependencies of every factor at play create barriers to innovation in the Healthcare space, making this tricky and why the help of companies like Nassau would be important to get some new ideas to market
• It's been hard for the industry to do innovation because it means changing, and it's tricky to balance having people free from the business to look at what's new but not too removed from the business for those new ideas to get implemented

This episode is brought to you by The Future of Insurance Volume III. The Collaborators, part of the Future of Insurance thought leadership series (future-of-insurance.com) from Bryan Falchuk.

Follow the podcast at future-of-insurance.com/podcast for more details and other episodes.

Music courtesy of Hyperbeat Music, available to stream or download on Spotify, Apple Music, and Amazon Music and more.