An ‘agents first’ philosophy for growth — With Pan‑American Life’s José Suquet

Twenty years ago, Pan‑American Life Insurance Group’s Chairman of the Board and CEO José Suquet was tasked with turning things around at the company, which was founded in 1911 by Crawford E. Ellis, a United Fruit Co. executive during the height of the banana trade between New Orleans and Honduras.

Suquet grew the business in core Latin American markets, overhauling the company’s financial structure and cutting business lines that were not central to the company’s strategy.

In the past two decades, he has grown company revenues from $284 million to nearly $1.5 billion. Pan-American Life, composed of more than 30 member companies, has a footprint in 49 states and more than 20 countries.

In this interview with InsuranceNewsNet publisher Paul Feldman, Suquet talks about the key to the company’s past, present and future success.

Paul Feldman: One of the things that impresses me is that you’ve gone from being an agent in the field to being CEO of an insurance company — and you have one of the longest tenures I know of: 20 years as CEO of Pan-American. Tell me how you got into the business, and tell me about your journey from agent to CEO.

José Suquet: I had just graduated from college at Fordham University in New York. I was already married — I got married at the young age of 20. We lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn. I went home — my mother was there and my wife was there, and I was all excited: I had received a job offer. They said, “Wow, what is it?” And I said, “Well, I’m going to become a life insurance agent.” 

And they immediately sat back and were a little trepidatious — to say the least. My mother started clutching her heart a little bit and she said, “Well, what kind of salary are you going to have?” And I said, “Well, they had two different plans. One was a salary and a small commission, but then they had a higher commission and a bonus on top of that, but no salary. And I decided to forgo the salary and go with the commission and bonus.”

At that point, I thought I had lost my mother. And my wife was also a bit scared. But it was the best decision I could have ever made. That was July 1, 1979.  I couldn’t have had a more dreamlike career. And I owe it all to my roots of being an agent first.

I kept selling, and I became a unit manager for Equitable. Six years later, in 1985, I was given an opportunity to move down to Miami to take over an agency. I took over a consolidated agency, and we had a great run there. We became one of the largest agencies in the industry in the span of about eight years. I ended up with about 300 agents.

We were doing about $25 million of new life insurance premium every year. We sold annuities, of course, through the broker-dealer, and mutual funds and investment products. I had 13 unit managers. I had an estate planning attorney on staff, a pension attorney on staff, a securities products coordinator and a marketing director.

Feldman: That’s impressive infrastructure.

Suquet: At that time, Jim Benson, who’s a legendary figure in the insurance industry, had come to Equitable, and he asked me to come up to the home office at Equitable. And at that time, AXA had taken a minority stake at Equitable. We went public before I moved up there, and we had a tremendous run. So I became head of the agency system at AXA Equitable and then took over as head of distribution. I was responsible for all of the agency system, all of the third-party distribution, such as regular brokerage, as well as banks, wirehouses, broker-dealers. We were running a big shop at the time and took it from about $4 billion or $5 billion in sales to about $13 billion in sales in about a seven- or eight-year period.

That would have been 2000, 2001.  We became a private United States subsidiary of AXA, and I decided that it was a good time to explore other opportunities. I left AXA, took some time, and then was recruited by BISYS, the largest life broker at that time, to run three different businesses for them. I had experience there with brokerage and then decided that I wanted to go back into the carrier world and took some time there. 

Feldman: Equitable has a multi-national arm. Were you involved with that as well?

Suquet: Not really, no. It was all U.S. focused. We had a tremendous run there. At that time, we had some $60 billion in variable annuities assets under management. Equitable today is still a leader in the VA and indexed annuity business. We were also very big in variable life business. Equitable, during the late 1980s, early ’90s, was having some difficult times. It was very difficult to sell general account products because of the issues that Equitable was dealing with. So we developed variable life products, and we became the leader in variable products at the time.

I took some time off, hung up a consulting shingle and did a couple of consulting projects for big-name firms that you would know. Then I was offered an opportunity by a couple of the major Northeastern insurers to run distribution or run a business or two. But I did not want to go back to the big carriers.  I wanted to run my own show. So I just held out.

The Pan-American search firm called me, and I believed it was an ideal fit. Many people in the industry who knew me were surprised that I would go to such a small company. But it has been a ride that has far exceeded my personal and professional expectations. It was not an agent-centric company.

I remember changing that immediately. I’m very optimistic that even when I’m not here — and I plan to be here for quite some time — I’ve made it clear that nothing happens in an insurance company until an application comes in the door. Your assets that you manage don’t increase until apps start coming in the door. You don’t have underwriters. You don’t have anything. I had to instill that. You should be ringing celebratory bells when the business comes in the door. That’s a real shift in culture at many carriers.

Feldman: I haven’t heard another carrier say it like that.

Suquet: Some carriers must think, “This would be a really great place if it weren’t for these pesky agents.” I had carried a rate book under my arm, so I was the complete opposite of that. I think that has permeated and will continue to permeate for at least a generation or two after I’m gone.

Feldman: What kind of changes are you seeing around the industry? 

Suquet: I’ve been in the industry for 46 years as of July 1. One of the biggest changes is the emergence of private equity in the business, at both the carrier level and the distribution level. I think that’s healthy overall. I would tell you that at the carrier level, the private equity folks are in it for an asset play and to manage assets. I think that they’re experts at that. For the most part, a number of the carriers that have gone down this path have reduced their distribution or sold their distribution or closed it up, and that’s fine. That’s understandable.

On the distribution side, the private equity firms have been the beneficiaries of this phenomenon of carriers exiting distribution. So whether it’s the Simplicys, the Integritys, etc., we happen
to be on the shelf space of just about most of the major distribution organizations in the industry, primarily in the life insurance space. We also, in the U.S., do a group of fixed indemnity products and stop-loss. 

We’re on the shelf space on some of that as well. The product shift has gone from variable and fixed products, which we’re still in, in the whole life to indexed —
lots of indexed — whether it’s variable annuities or indexed universal life. So that’s been a change over the last 20 years, all for the good of the industry.

I think another big 800-pound gorilla is the increased pace and associated cost of regulatory and technology changes and, in particular, information security and data breaches. That has taken hold, and you must build defenses around your data and around your systems. You must educate your employees, your executives. You must provide tools for education and protection to your distributors because everyone is at risk from a cybersecurity point of view.

The regulatory environment continues to increase in scope and severity. And this is from someone who is involved in 22 different countries, jurisdictions outside of the U.S., in addition to 49 states in the United States where we’re involved and we have a fairly large regulatory infrastructure. So we don’t fight the regulation; we try and stay ahead of it and try and make it as easy as possible to do business with our distributors.

I think some companies have tried to get into markets that they probably shouldn’t be in or they don’t have the necessary expertise for. We have stayed true to our values and purpose, which is life, health and accident. We are not going to go after the shiny new object on the product front. We have stayed focused on whole life, participating whole life, through our absorption of Mutual Trust Life Insurance Co., and that has gone well. We’ll be celebrating our 10th anniversary of that. We have numerous choices for our agents and brokers.

And then we have recently introduced an indexed universal life product family that focuses on the simplicity of the indexed UL. So I think that those are the major changes.

On the distribution front, we continue to realize that you have to earn distributors’ business through a competitive product set, but also through superior service and an understanding of what they do. I may be either a dying breed or a dinosaur, because I don’t think there are too many people like me who have carried a rate book and who are now running insurance companies. My mission is to make sure that the understanding that “nothing happens until an app comes in the door” permeates for another couple of generations at least in our company.

Feldman: I think that is a strong philosophy: putting your agents first. They’re the ones writing your policies. And putting distributors first because they’re helping you get your products out there.

Suquet: And another nuance about us: We do not go direct to the consumer. Our primary customer is the distributor. Even in our stop-loss business, where carriers have direct sales forces to the groups, we do not. We have a network of managing general underwriters that do this for us. So we do not go direct. We believe that our primary customer is the agent, the broker, the independent marketing organization and that is our starting point. Our first focus is service through that intermediary.

Feldman: Pan-American Life serves some niche markets in the industry. Tell us a little bit about these niches.

Suquet: When I first came here, the chairman at that time who recruited me said, “All of the challenges you are facing and the heavy, heavy competition are out of New Orleans and the United States. All of your opportunities are international.” 

For my first few years, I focused on Latin America. In hindsight, it was the absolute best move. We had a variable life product that I shut down. I shut down our disability business. I did not want to compete in independent distribution with the big boys, as I call them, such as National Life or Pacific Life. All their CEOs are good friends of mine, and needless to say, those carriers are big mutual companies. We didn’t want to start off competing with that. So we went where no man has dared to go. And it proved very good for us.

As things developed, we said, “Well, how do we expand in the United States?” And little by little we created niches, but we also said we need some scale. We converted the company to a mutual holding company, and we said, “What’s the universe of potential merger partners out there?” And Mutual Trust came up, and we hit it off with them. They were looking for a potential merger partner, and that got us into the middle-market whole life business. We’ve done that successfully for 10 years. We have a terrific distribution head of our U.S. life business, Luke Cosme, who does a great job.

We also have a niche in our high net worth foreign national business. A lot of wealthy foreigners who have a connection to the United States are looking for a high-quality company that understands that market and is not afraid of the underwriting risk, the international travel. And we do that quite well. We are experts in that area. 

I think that maybe it’s because of my upbringing. I was born in Cuba and have been here since I was 2 years old. Even though we do business in 22 different countries, I still think this is the greatest country on earth. I think there’s a lot of opportunity here.

I think we’re in a real sweet spot, as long as we understand the dynamics and the risks. We have a cadre of about five reinsurers that like our business quite a bit. We have a very good track record with our reinsurers. So that’s a real niche. And that’s what we do in the United States: middle-market whole life, now indexed universal life backed up by a number of selling systems and then the high net worth foreign national business, all on the life insurance front.

Feldman: What do you see as your company’s biggest opportunity in the next five years?

Suquet: In the next five years, we want to continue to explore the Hispanic market. We’re also unique in that, through our footprint in Latin America, we have Hispanics whose parents or grandparents came from one of the countries that we currently do business in. We’re not a fly-by-night in these countries. We have been in Panama 110 years. 

We’ve been elsewhere in Central America more than 70 years. We’re looking for cross-border opportunities in trade. Even though there’s talk of the tariffs and all that, there’s still significant trade going on between Mexico and the United States. So we think that we’re uniquely positioned in terms of the life, health, and accident and travel accident products to capture cross-border type opportunities. That’s where I see the niche.

We think that the emergence of other parts of the world and their interest in the United States will continue to feed this high net worth foreign national business. So we want to continue to do that. We had our best year ever in 2024. We’re off and running again in 2025.

Feldman: One of the products that you recently launched or are launching, your indexed UL, is exciting. Will that be available through normal distribution?

Suquet: Yes, that is available in the United States. We have it available in our high net worth foreign market as well. So it is available; it’s taking hold. 

Feldman: Are annuities an area of growth that you see in the future? 

Suquet: They really are not. I have found throughout my career that it’s almost as important to not do things as it is to focus and go in specific directions, and we just don’t have the scale. I’d rather devote the excess capital that we have on continuing to grow our life business, the stop-loss, the group business and then our international activities as well. So now, annuity is not in the cards and I doubt very much it will ever be.

Feldman: Is there anything that I didn’t ask that I should have?

Suquet: I believe leadership is not a position, but it’s an action and the actions that lead to a position. I’m blessed to have a leadership position, but it was built by the actions I’ve chosen throughout my career and continue to display.

You must walk the talk as a leader and have clear, articulated tactics and strategies that people know. People should not guess how you feel about things. They certainly don’t have to guess with me. I’m an open book. Good, bad or ugly, they know how I feel about issues; they know how I feel about current events. As a leader, in any dealings that you have with your clients, you must be transparent and you must be authentic. 

Paul Feldman started the website InsuranceNewsNet in 1999, followed by InsuranceNewsNet Magazine in 2008. Paul was a third-generation insurance agent before venturing into the media business. Paul won the 2012 Integrated Marketing Award (IMA) for Lead Gen Initiative for his Truth about Agent Recruiting video and was the runner-up for IMA's Marketer of the Year, a competition that includes consumer and B2B publishing companies. Find out more about Paul at www.paulfeldman.com.