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Spotlight on: Aaron Seurkamp at Protective Life Corporation

June 2025

Q: Can you share the journey that led you to your current position?

I joined Protective as my first post-collegiate job in 2004, serving as a life insurance internal wholesaler. Over the past 21 years, I have rotated through 13 different positions supporting both life insurance and annuity product lines, leading to my current role as president of the Protection and Retirement Division at Protective Life. Throughout my career, I have remained inspired and motivated by the social mission we serve, offering our customers protection during the most important times of their lives.

Q: What sets your company apart from others in your industry?

The culture, sense of belonging and clarity of mission are prevalent across all employees at Protective. I believe a great company should always realize four key objectives to ensure an engaged workforce: 1) The team needs to truly believe in the mission. 2) Each member of the team needs to understand how their role positively impacts the mission. 3) The team needs to trust, care about and respect one another. 4) Each member of the team needs to be driven to learn, grow and succeed. I see these attributes every day among my 3,600 colleagues.

Q: How do you balance short-term operational goals with long-term strategic objectives?

The first step in developing long-term strategic objectives is to align the organization behind a shared definition of success. Each short-term operational goal should be sequenced based on organizational capacity and its ultimate ability to enable the long-term strategic vision. The discipline of perpetual alignment to long-term strategic objectives enables clear prioritization, trade-offs and ultimately resource optimization across the enterprise.

Q: What emerging trends in the industry are you most excited about and why?

There are many exciting trends that are transforming the way the industry delivers value to its customers. The evolution of the risk selection process and automated underwriting has forever changed the competitive landscape. The ability to leverage technology platforms to integrate annuities into holistic wealth management plans continues to increase. The need for the industry’s products is tremendous, and the continued evolution of technology is making those products easier to access than ever before.

Q: What strategies do you use to empower your leadership team and your organization?

An empowered organization starts with great clarity around a shared definition of success. After success is defined, a clear strategy must be articulated that outlines how the business will create a competitive advantage in the market. Once those two steps are completed and aligned across the organization, all members of the team should feel empowered to make decisions and affect change that best enables the definition of success within the framework of the identified competitive advantage for a business line.

Q: What initiatives has your team undertaken to improve customer experience and engagement?

Investing in the customer experience continues to be a critical component of success across the industry, both from an experience and an expense management perspective, enabled via self-service capabilities. Our efforts in the annuity product category have focused primarily on improving the ownership experience. Advisors and their clients need to be able to interact with their annuity carrier in the same way as all the other products they offer in a holistic wealth management plan. Our efforts in the life insurance product category have focused primarily on the purchase experience, specifically on how we can make the buying process as simple as possible without sacrificing confidence in the risk selection process.

Q: What role does technology play in overcoming these challenges?

Carriers face multiple competitive challenges: direct competition from other carriers, product alternatives outside the insurance sector and purchase avoidance due to perceptions about the complicated purchase process. Technology is a foundational element that helps to overcome each of these competitive challenges via improved purchase and ownership experiences that align with contemporary customer expectations.

Q: Can you share a significant achievement or milestone the advisory board has reached during your tenure?

The Annuity Advisory Board ratified a set of guiding principles early in its inception that has served as a framework for all of our activities to date. The four guiding principles include: 1) The board will help to inform the LIMRA research agenda, 2) The board will enable forums to discuss macro industry issues impacting the annuity business line, 3) The board will identify potential industry level business process improvements and then refer those concepts to an appropriate industry group for exploration, 4) The board will provide a networking platform to build relationships across the industry.

Aligning behind a shared definition of success for the group has enabled productive conversations throughout my tenure on the board.

Aaron serves as the chair of LIMRA’s Annuity Advisory Board.

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