What Prudential Benefits Sellers Are Seeing Now

Prudential Financial Inc. has come up with a strategy for increasing America’s overall level of insurance, employee benefits and financial wellness awareness: It’s been inviting reporters to a series of quarterly press conferences in New York.

The latest press conference, held Tuesday, attracted reporters from organizations like Bloomberg and CNBC, as well as from publications aimed at financial services professionals.

Prudential sells retirement services, group life, group disability and supplemental health benefits products, such as hospital indemnity insurance, but not group health insurance or employer health plan stop-loss coverage. The company’s earlier press conference focused on topics such as overall financial wellness and the state of the retirement services market.

For the latest session, Prudential brought out members of the group benefits management team: Jamie Kalamarides, president of Prudential Group Insurance; Jessica Gillespie, head of national accounts for group insurance; Jessica Vanscavish, the vice president for voluntary benefits; and Terrie Sorensen, the vice president for absence and short-term disability product management.

For agents, brokers and financial advisors, one takeaway is that financial wellness-oriented benefits communication efforts are still hot. ”When people are focused on financial wellness, their engagement improves and their overall results improve,” Kalamarides said.

Another takeaway is that Prudential’s client employers are asking for help with managing the aging of the workforce.

For financial services professionals in the individual market, those trends could translate into:

More competition from Prudential, and other players, that are active in the voluntary benefits market.
New opportunities to approach workers who have heard a little bit, but not enough, about insurance products and concepts at the workplace.
More clients ages 60 to 85 who are still working for wages.

For more of what came up at the press conference, see the idea cards in the slideshow above.

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