Life and annuity (L&A) insurance is evolving from a transaction-centric protection model toward a more continuous customer relationship. Carriers are increasingly using wellness propositions to drive engagement beyond the policy transaction, AI to personalize customer and advisor interactions and data-driven underwriting, and modern platforms to reduce friction across the insurance life cycle.
These shifts are changing the capabilities required to deliver the L&A proposition. While carriers will continue to own the customer relationship, product strategy, risk decisions, and governance, capabilities such as ecosystem integration, consent and data orchestration, AI-enabled engagement, workflow automation, and platform connectivity can increasingly be supported by external technology and services partners.
The emerging opportunity for providers is, therefore, not simply to modernize the L&A technology estate but to help carriers build and operate the infrastructure behind continuous customer engagement. The extent to which these capabilities become reusable across carriers, however, will depend on customer ownership, data governance, regulatory requirements, proposition differentiation, and the economics of shared delivery.
Together, these shifts move L&A from episodic protection toward continuous engagement and increase the importance of the infrastructure required to deliver that relationship.
Recent carrier initiatives suggest that wellness is moving from an adjacent engagement feature toward a more visible part of the insurance proposition. The approaches vary, but they share a common objective: creating value for policyholders before a claim occurs.
MassMutuali has incorporated its Living Well Rider into eligible new whole life policies at no additional cost, providing access to services such as multicancer early detection, genetic risk assessment, and mental health support. Participation is voluntary, results do not affect existing policies or premiums, and the carrier receives only high-level anonymized information. This keeps customer health data separate from underwriting decisions.
John Hancockii continues to connect wellness to protection and advice. Its Longer. Healthier. Better. Network brings independent financial professionals together to focus on longevity and financial protection, building on its long-established Vitality program. Here, wellness broadens the advisor conversation beyond the protection transaction.
New York Lifeiii has pursued a curated ecosystem approach. Through its Healthy Living program, eligible policyowners can access offers from wellness partners spanning wearables, health management tools, and behavior change programs, under those providers’ own terms. The model shows how insurers can assemble a wellness proposition without delivering every service directly.
These examples point to real carrier demand rather than a single winning operating model. Wellness creates the reasons to engage, but turning those interactions into relevant, timely engagement increasingly depends on AI.
L&A carriers are starting to use AI to shape customer engagement around the individual rather than the segment, and most of that change is happening through the advisor. Prudential’siv retail advisory arm shows how. It now uses Gen AI to turn existing customer data into insights that help advisors personalize outreach. It also applies propensity models to show which prospects are most likely to convert, and adds hundreds of third-party attributes, such as household composition and life-event triggers, to its lead profiles. The result is less a cross-sell campaign and more a set of prompts telling an advisor whom to contact, when, and about what.
The same logic is reaching the moments in the advisor’s day that slow the conversation down. Carriers are cutting the time spent searching for answers and doing administrative work. Prudential’s Individual Life Insurance business provides financial professionals with a Gen AI-powered hub for product, underwriting, and policy documentation inquiries, with most responses delivered in under 22 seconds. John Hancockvi has cut preliminary underwriting assessments for less complex cases from a day to about 15 minutes. Sun Lifevii uses Gen AI to summarize client meetings and draft follow-ups, saving advisors 15 to 30 minutes per session. Each saves only minutes, but together they shift advisor time from finding information to talking with clients.
The third shift is about speed: shortening the time between a customer’s intent to buy and coverage activation, and between a product idea and its launch. Underwriting was, for a long time, one of the biggest barriers. Traditional medical exams and fluid tests could stretch issuance over weeks or months. Accelerated underwriting changes that by using external data, analytics, and predictive models, and can cut the process to a few hours for eligible applicants. Nationwideviii shows how this works in practice. Its underwriters combine digital interviews with existing lab results, medical history, and prescription data, so some of the healthiest clients can skip exams and lab work entirely. In this model, data does not replace underwriting judgment. It provides the underwriter with enough evidence to make a decision sooner.
The same compression is now reaching product delivery, especially in annuities, where demand is strong and distribution windows open and close quickly. Here, the change is coming less from individual tools and more from platforms. Zinniaix reports that carriers on its platform can bring new annuity products to market in as little as three months, with straight-through processing above 95% for new business. USAA and Kuvare have both recently expanded their relationships with the provider. USAAx is launching new annuity products on the platform. Kuvarexi is moving its policy administration and digital experience to Zinnia; additionally, its first fixed-indexed annuity was built on the platform and launched in April 2026.
What links these developments is a shift in the source of speed. Faster underwriting and faster product launches are becoming capabilities of the platform rather than results of one-off transformation programs. Carriers still own risk appetite, product design, and pricing decisions. But the data connections, decision workflows, and platforms that carry out those decisions are increasingly built and run with external partners.
Wellness ecosystems can involve insurers, policyholders, technology platforms, and independent health service providers. Their data arrangements cannot be reduced to the assertion that whoever “owns the data pipe” captures the value. MassMutual’s anonymized data approach and New York Life’s separately governed third-party services show why the answer depends on the proposition and the role of each participant. The carrier must be clear about the customer promise and its own use of information; partners must operate within defined permissions and responsibilities.
Privacy and regulatory requirements make this an operating model issue, not merely a technical integration task. In the UKxii, health and genetic information can qualify as special category data, requiring additional conditions for lawful processing. In the USxiii, the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ AI model bulletin sets out expectations for insurers’ governance of AI used in consumer-impacting decisions, including attention to fairness, accuracy, and data vulnerabilities; it is a model bulletin, not a single nationwide law. Requirements will vary by market and use case, but the design question is consistent: what data is needed, for which purpose, by which party, and under what permission and oversight?
Across wellness, personalization, and underwriting, the strategic requirement is increasingly not ownership of customer data but the ability to securely connect, govern, and activate permitted data across the insurance ecosystem.
Providers may be able to help insurers connect wellness partners, manage permissions, integrate approved data, and support secure workflows. AI can increase the usefulness of that infrastructure, but it cannot substitute for a lawful basis for processing, clear governance, or appropriate controls. This is a more defensible supply-side proposition than suggesting providers should own or freely pool sensitive customer data.
For technology and services providers, the opportunity lies in capabilities that a carrier may choose to source or operate in partnership. These include wellness partner integration, consent and data workflows, AI-enabled engagement and advisor tools, underwriting data infrastructure, platform connectivity, and ongoing service management. Making these capabilities reusable across carriers may be attractive. However, each implementation must still respect the carrier’s proposition, contractual arrangements, customer permissions, and applicable rules.
L&A insurance is beginning to move from an episodic protection model toward a more continuous customer relationship. Wellness creates reasons to engage between policy purchase and claim; AI enables more individualized interactions; and data-driven underwriting and modern platforms reduce friction across the product life cycle. These shifts remain at different stages of maturity, and no single operating model has emerged as the industry standard.
For carriers, the strategic question will be which capabilities remain differentiated and internally controlled and which can be industrialized through external partners. For providers, the opportunity extends beyond traditional modernization: data orchestration, AI-enabled engagement, ecosystem integration, underwriting infrastructure, and managed platform operations can create more reusable and recurring sources of value.
The value of wellness will depend less on how many features insurers launch and more on whether customers keep using them. That will happen only when programs feel relevant, are easy to access, and are clearly tied to the insurance relationship. Trust will matter as much as functionality. Insurers that are clear about what data is shared, with whom, and for what purpose, and that keep wellness participation separate from underwriting and pricing, are better positioned to sustain engagement. For service providers, the opportunity lies not in owning the customer or the data. It lies in building and running the infrastructure behind these propositions, combining partner integration, consent workflows, and engagement platforms with insurance domain depth and governance discipline.
The next phase of L&A competition will, therefore, be shaped not only by the products insurers offer but also by how effectively they connect customer engagement, data, AI, underwriting, and ecosystem capabilities. For service providers, the opportunity is to move from implementing these capabilities separately for each carrier toward building reusable infrastructure and managed services where carrier needs converge. Customer ownership, product differentiation, risk decisions, and data accountability should stay firmly with the insurer.
iii https://www.newyorklife.com/newsroom/new-york-life-healthy-living
viii https://financial.nationwide.com/media/pdf/NFM-23661AO.pdf
x https://zinnia.com/news/zinnia-usaa-annuity-innovation
xi https://zinnia.com/news/zinnia-kuvare-partnership-expansion
By Shivam Arora, Lead Analyst, and Sahil Chaudhary, Associate Research Director
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