Bringing meaning to life — With Salene Hitchcock-Gear

Salene Hitchcock-Gear, president of Prudential Individual Life, is on a mission to bring life insurance and related products to more Americans who need financial protection. Hitchcock-Gear wants to make a 151-year-old company relevant to the needs and concerns of 21st-
century consumers by incorporating more technology into the life insurance buying process as well as bringing wellness initiatives to help policyholders live longer and healthier lives. At the same time, she endeavors to keep Prudential true to its roots of partnering with its agent field force to bring life insurance to everyday Americans.

Hitchcock-Gear is an advocate for the industry. As the first Black woman to chair the board of The American College of Financial Services, she worked to evolve the curriculum to better prepare the next generation of financial advisors.

In this interview with InsuranceNewsNet publisher Paul Feldman, she describes the trends she sees in the insurance marketplace and her vision of the industry’s future.

PAUL FELDMAN: How did you get into the insurance business?

SALENE HITCHCOCK-GEAR: I got into the insurance business via my law background. I was supposed to be an architect, but I didn’t have the freehand drawing skills, so I wound up becoming a lawyer. As a lawyer, I found myself working with clients on things where financial matters were front and center.

I had an opportunity to work for an insurance company in their advanced markets. They hired lawyers and accountants to do highly technical work. I thought it was a nice way to learn a little bit about some of the things I could use to bring more value to my clients.

That was more than 30 years ago. I keep my law license open, but I became deeply connected to the insurance industry from that first job, and I found the industry to be of high value and high impact for people.

One thing led to another, and I moved into more management roles. I feel privileged to work at a company where I see a lot coming to the marketplace in terms of the products we offer and how we bring value to people. It has been a lot of fun.

FELDMAN: You serve on many different boards, and you’re highly involved in the industry. What are some things you see as issues and trends in the marketplace?

HITCHCOCK-GEAR: I see two things. One is technology and the advent of artificial intelligence and what it can and should do to help us bring more information to people, make our processes easier and bring more to our overall value proposition. 

The second is that there are so many underinsured people in the U.S. For some time now, we have been thinking and talking about how we can expand access, open new products and bring our products to more people. 

And then there’s an interesting underpinning to all of this, and it would sort of be in the health sector. It’s the idea that we are post-COVID-19 and seeing some improved mortality capabilities, whether it’s talking about GLP-1 drugs or other things that might help people live better, healthier lives. It’s a positive tailwind for the insurance industry. If we can kind of get on the same side of someone in their health journey, it’s good for them. It’s good for us.

FELDMAN: Let’s talk about technology and AI. There has been a lot of hype about AI, but a lot of people don’t understand AI. How are you finding uses for AI in your operations?

HITCHCOCK-GEAR: AI isn’t a thing for tomorrow; it’s a thing for today. That’s where we see some different trends than we see in other types of technology. 

For a long time in the insurance business, we had this adoption challenge. You have all this great technology, but you have to get people to adopt it. 

I think AI is presenting a much faster entry to market. It kind of started with things such as risk and compliance, where you can get to some intelligence automation early and where you can measure and monitor.

I do this thing at Prudential where I go talk to people and they have some great new thing and you ask them a basic question: How does it do that? Most of the time, the answer is “Well, we don’t know.” I can’t use something where you don’t know. We need outcomes and we need certainty. 

AI has begun taking off in the things we can count, measure and compare outcomes around. 

In our back office, we’ve been able to use AI to help our case managers determine, where is a case? What is the tracking system? How do we see what’s missing?

We’ve also been able to use some of our AI writing tools to look at physician statements and get some of our medical information condensed and consolidated. We are relying on AI to improve efficiency going forward.

On the front end, we are getting into things like agentic AI and how our customers can have conversations where your agentic AI can do intake talk and ask the basic questions, bring data into your environment, and get things solved more easily. This is particularly important in our claims areas, where people need to get the funds they’ve been waiting for and get them quickly.

FELDMAN: What kind of futuristic things are you seeing? 

HITCHCOCK-GEAR: Let’s talk about agentic AI some more. We recently talked to some firms that are building these agentic properties, and I learned that these tools can now bring empathy to conversations. What that means is they have the capability to listen and understand. Is someone frustrated? Are they confused? How do we need to guide the conversation? We’re on the cusp of being able to have intelligent and thoughtful interactions with people instead of using some of the robotic tools we’re accustomed to hearing and seeing. I think that’s fantastic because it will create more opportunity if we pull those tools all the way through to the mechanics of our business.

I’m excited that here at Prudential, I’ve been working on underwriting enhancements, trying to make it easier for people to get insurance. Underwriting is the heart and soul of how we price and manage risk and think about which customers we can cover at what cost. For about 10 years, we have been working on what I call automated underwriting. Underwriting has a lot of rules, so we started with the rules-based philosophy. We are now moving into more predictive analytics, which is helpful because it removes friction from the application process whereby we can take things such as electronic medical data and pair that up against profiles we already know. We’ve been writing insurance at Prudential for 150 years, so we already have a lot of data. We have a lot of know-how. If we can take your electronic information and match that against what we already know, we can come back to people and issue certain policies within minutes based on those fact patterns, because we have those data sets. 

So the opportunity is to take these predictive, analytic, machine learning-type things we’ve been building, bring in some of this external electronic data, and give personalized, real-time offers to people that are good for us in terms of speed and pricing.

I think the idea that we can take more public data and more public health information and work with our reinsurers and others around the industry to assemble and share some of this information could bring powerful tools to our industry. The idea is just to make it easier for people to get insurance coverage.

FELDMAN: Prudential serves a lot of independent marketing organizations, and you also have your career distribution channel. What kind of tools are you using for training? How can the industry do a better job of training?

HITCHCOCK-GEAR: As in many environments, we’re at this intersection where it’s human plus tech. What I would say for sure is that the value of an advisor isn’t the technical work. That’s a little bit of table stakes. You have to be good at the technical side — setting goals, using tools. But it’s the coaching, it’s the ability to motivate and encourage people to take the steps needed to get something accomplished.

I think that the human sense of what people value has matched up with how these tools get you to outcomes and get consumers to do something. I think the role of an advisor is to engage with people in a way that gets them to take those important steps. That means you still need to be able to relate to people, know how to do good interviews, to understand all the empathy parts of it. I don’t think technology will take any of that away. I think technology enables us to do more.

I know that we have many successful advisors who say they can handle maybe 150 to 200 clients. That’s it. Yet you have this growing list of people who tell us they need someone to help them. So there’s this conflict about how to bring more people into the business. We know that is slow and difficult. And then how do we make sure we can get people to the advice components they want? 

There are a couple of things we at Prudential do to bring new people into the business. We have programs that can take you from college or career change to wherever you want to get you engaged. We have extensive training. A lot of it is mentoring, but some of it is educational, foundational things such as getting your securities licenses.

I not only work with our agents at Prudential but we work with so many other external parties who distribute our products that we have to use our wholesalers from Prudential to help train and educate a wide variety of advisors out there. And we use AI and technology in certain categories.

For example, if I am working for Prudential and I am either an agent or a wholesaler, how do I make the best use of my time? I need good case management tools, good sort and hunt tools. In the old days, if you needed to know what a particular form was, you’d have a marketing assistant or someone around to help you with that. Now we can put it online and give you good sort tools. We’re trying to bring as much technology as we can that’s intuitive, where your whole life as an advisor isn’t just about learning new tools. We have a lot that we’re trying to do with AI, where you can put in a prompt and get what you need. 

As we’re working with external distribution, we must be mindful of their systems as well. But a lot of the tools that we build now have application programming interface connections, meaning we don’t have to hardwire things. We are putting in the hands of our wholesalers many tools that help them understand for the advisors they work with things like, what did they last do with which clients? Where did they leave off with the case? 

Another layer is around understanding how we can best use these tools again to make consuming all this information easier. What’s the next thing I need to do? Where am I in the process? So we built a fully digital case-tracking management tool and system to kind of take the guesswork out of things. If an advisor is working with us, they can better understand where something is.

I think it’s a combination of how do we make it easier for the advisor? How do we give more transparency to the process? 

And then how do we extend some of that to our client layer? For example, we have a tool called Life Insight, where an advisor can immediately see what their cash values are, what’s happening in their policy. 

We’ve been able to elevate data to where we can now manage our policies better, give people more insight more quickly, make sure that things are more readily available and at the advisor’s and the client’s fingertips. And I would say there’s more that we can do.

FELDMAN: There are a lot of insurance companies that have orphan policies, where the agent died or retired or left the business, and the policyholder doesn’t have an agent. How can AI and technology serve their policyholders better?

HITCHCOCK-GEAR: We have very robust protocols at Prudential where we can identify who those policyholders are and work to reassign them to someone who contacts them. We use Salesforce and notify someone “We sent you this person who needs help as a lead, as someone for you to talk to, to support. You have 24 hours to contact this person or we reassign them.”

We work through a lot of things in our contact centers and in our service environments. We make sure that our service professionals know how to help people do things like get online access to their policy information. We have built quick and easy premium payment portals. 

We recently put together a new team just to be more thoughtful about our in-force support and in-force management of our policies, and particularly in places where we know we could have more contact with people. 

I would also say we have opportunities for carriers to understand what insurance people have today and what they might need more of. So for example, you get a raise at work, you buy a new house of higher value, you have another child or some new dependent that you need to care for. We have built what we call the Simplified Solutions team, things that are designed to be easy and straightforward and likely digital and embedded in various places where you might find insurance opportunities. 

There are two features in some of our digital products that I think are novel and helpful to people. One is that we have term insurance in a digital environment. We put a feature in some of our term products where if you have a financial hardship, you can keep your policy in force for up to six months and give us $1 of premium each month to keep it alive. 

We also know that people have opportunities where they might need more insurance. So if you have a life change, we’ve made it easier for you to get additional insurance.

FELDMAN: I started working in the insurance business when I was 19 years old, and ever since I entered the business, there’s been talk about the decline of producers, which is a leading reason for so many Americans being uninsured or underinsured. How can the industry allow this to happen?

HITCHCOCK-GEAR: From the day I joined this industry, this has been that chicken-and-egg question. I think this is a multifaceted and ongoing dialogue for the industry, and I think it starts in a couple of places. We all know in this industry that insurance is sold and not bought, and the people who are in the business are trained and not really recruited. Being an insurance person or financial professional is a great career once you mature in what you’re doing. You have a high degree of time and income flexibility, and a high degree of mobility. I mean every lifestyle advantage you can think of resides in this industry, and yet we can’t draw enough people in. We have some carriers who recruit right from college. We have others who just want people who are already in this room. 

I think the dynamic around our industry must do more than reflect on the problem. We must put in a lot of new thinking, and I think there are a couple of important trends that I see starting to take root that will help us. I think we have strong and compelling information that will tell people that with learning designations and real career ambition, your professional status with your client gets exemplified. There’s this idea that an insurance career is sales, and I think that is off-putting to many people. We have high standards for professionalism in this industry. These designations help you understand how to care for a client, not just sell a product.

We have had so much positivity in the industry around financial planning. You can think about it as needs analysis and values-based selling, all the way now into full-fledged financial plans. We have a broad variety of tools to help people reach their goals. I think curriculum designations and these financial planning trends help us bring a professional status to a career that is meaningful for people. 

We’re an industry that can add how to bring value and meaning to life with technology tools. We need to raise awareness that this is a true profession and that there are real standards, there’s professionalism to this that brings real value. 

I serve on the board of The American College, and we are doing more today than we ever have around bringing awareness to all the designations around retirement. We have a marquee event called Horizons, which is focused on retirement, and we had about 1,200 people assemble last year to talk about the retirement challenge.

I think the second thing we must do is make the reality of what technology can do in our business a more compelling story to help us to serve more people. 

To me, the biggest trend that complements this knowledge and financial planning and professionalism is the idea that many in the industry now are relying on teams, not just solo practitioners, in the dynamics of how people work together in the profession. That, to me, is where the rubber hits the road, because you have to learn from people. There isn’t a training program I’ve ever seen that replaces mentorship and one-on-one training and development to know how to work with people, approach people, build your business and be successful. 

I believe the industry has an obligation and responsibility to keep talking about what we do and home in on the value our carriers and distribution partners need to continue to amplify the professionalism, the good work we do and why it is so important to be part of this industry. Then we must have the sort of innards — the technology and products and experience. We also need to tell people what life is like if you’re in this profession. I think that all comes from people working together in these team dynamics and making sure we don’t lose sight of the importance of mentorship and development. 

FELDMAN: It seems like the biggest recruiters in the industry right now are multilevel companies. How do you feel about that?

HITCHCOCK-GEAR: When we consider this big uninsured and underinsured population, we need all of us in this industry to come together. And I think multilevel marketing organizations have a real role to play. We also don’t want to forget that these can be full-time, highly professional career ladders as well.

With multilevel marketing organizations, we know a lot of people work part time and this is a way to do it, and it might help us with this base of coverage we need. But I also want to make sure we bring all those people along and through. 

Along with the multilevel marketing organization conversation, we also must think about the technology and the fact that we have many groups of people who are either self-proclaimed do-it-yourselfers or more comfortable doing things electronically. We must make sure our carriers and our distribution layers include room for these tech-enabled protocols and processes. 

I believe it’s a multifaceted approach and everyone plays a part in it. If we work together as an industry and talk about the dynamics of our products and how they work and help people, I believe we can do a better job tethering these things together.

FELDMAN: Talk about how Prudential is helping people live longer, which I think is the smartest thing an insurer can do.

HITCHCOCK-GEAR: We’re having a dialogue in the industry about what our role is in the health and wellness space — how we help people see us as advocates with them for better life and health. It’s at the core of what we do, because it’s how we underwrite and it’s how we understand people. I think we’re only just beginning to bring together some of the tools that can make this a reality.

For example, I sit in on a lot of industry conversations about some of the medical advancements we have for diagnosing and treating cancer. It’s about the idea that if you get in front of diseases and health challenges, you will have a longer life, you have better underwriting circumstances, etc. So we’re having a lot of dialogue about GLP-1 drugs and other new things that we know can help people with chronic illnesses in the U.S. How do we think about the mortality implications of this? 

In our industry, we give you a price for a product on Day 1, and your health might improve over time. How do we build more flexibility in our models to account for that? We’re just scratching the surface on what that looks like.

One of the things we don’t do a great job of in the life insurance industry is talking about the fact that permanent life insurance has benefits while you are living, not just for beneficiaries at the end — whether it’s retirement, illness riders or planning your cash accumulation so that it is tax advantaged and well placed for emergencies. One of the things we must talk more about is if you think about insurance as an asset class, as a risk management tool — you want to live longer. We want you to live longer so you can accumulate more benefits and use them.