u/Zestyclose_Tutor2486

I swear when I got into life insurance a few years back it was mostly FEX and a term policy here and there. I never saw so many ads for annuity funnels or IUL masterclasses.

Knowing and seeing in other agencies that brand new agents are setting up their clients with IULs and setting up their illustrations completely wrong is a major downside in the growth of these products

I think it is good that more and more people want something other then FEX but do you guys think the growth in these products will last after the 14% increase in Q1 this year?

Ok so I gotta talk about this because it's getting way too normal and nobody's saying anything.

There's these "black market leads" floating around right now that are stupid cheap and come loaded with everything. Like everything. Carrier, coverage amount, draft date, personal info. The agent doesn't even have to prospect. You just call someone who already has a policy and flip them into a new one. Sounds like a cheat code right?

It's not. That data is straight up stolen. Breaches, insider leaks, sketchy vendors selling info that was never theirs to sell. This isn't a gray area, it's illegal. Depending on what you actually do with it you're stacking felonies without even realizing it.

And half the time the "sale" is just twisting anyway. You're replacing a policy the client already had, restarting their contestability, and usually leaving them worse off, all so somebody can grab a fresh commission.

It’s crazy how many new agents have no clue what they're holding. Upline hands them a list, says start dialing, and the kid thinks he hit the lottery. Nah. You're the one whose license and voice is on that recorded call. Not them.

When is the fraud gonna end lol.

so i was helping my mom look at coverage and bro the process is nothing like what i pictured

i always thought you had to sit down with some agent at the kitchen table, get blood drawn, do the whole exam thing and then wait like a month to even hear back. nope. companies like ethos let you apply in like 5 min and a ton of people just get approved on the spot. no exam, just a couple health questions and basically an algorithm deciding everything

and apparently this is the norm now?? like 70% of new burial/final expense policies are no exam and almost half of people are just buying online instead of talking to anybody

half of me thinks it's actually kinda sick. less annoying steps means people actually get covered instead of putting it off forever. but the other half is like... what are you missing when there's no actual person explaining it. a chatbot is not gonna stop you from picking the wrong coverage amount or skipping something you'd actually want

anyway curious what yall think. if you bought recently did you do it all online or did you still want a real person. and if anyone actually works in this stuff, are the instant approval ones legit or are you better off doing the longer version

There's a certain type of agency everyone in this business has run into. The one where the only thing that matters is the leaderboard. Submit, submit, submit. Pile up AP, post the big weekly number, run the contest, and ignore what actually happens after the app goes in. For years that worked, because nobody was really looking at the back end in real time.

That era is ending, and AI underwriting is what ends it.

Some reporting came out of the LIMRA Life Insurance and Annuity Conference this year that laid it out pretty clearly. Carriers are pushing AI across the whole underwriting workflow now. Generative AI, machine learning, rule based systems, all of it. And the front end tools can analyze applicant behavior in real time and flag anomalies in digital applications as they come in. Recycled client info, answers that don't line up, all the pattern stuff that used to slide through. The system catches it now, not 90 days later.

Here's why that's a death sentence for the numbers only agency.

That whole model runs on volume over quality. Push your agents to submit as much as humanly possible, don't worry about whether it's clean, don't worry about whether it sticks. When underwriting was slow and human, you could bury a lot of garbage inside a big submit number. Now that it's AI driven and watching in real time, that garbage gets flagged, declined, or charged back fast. The big submit number collapses into a tiny issued and paid number, and the agency that lived on the leaderboard suddenly can't make payroll.

The shops that survive this are the ones that were never playing the submit game in the first place. The ones that drilled clean business, persistency, and actually doing right by the client. Their numbers were always real. Issued, paid, and staying on the books. So AI underwriting doesn't threaten them at all. It just makes them faster.

It's the same thing a lot of us have been saying forever. Submitted AP is an ego metric. Issued and retained AP is the real business. The only difference now is the carriers' own tech is about to enforce it whether these agencies like it or not.

So I'll throw it to the room. Do you think the volume obsessed shops actually adapt, or do they just quietly disappear over the next couple years as the tech tightens up?

Everyone's losing their mind over the State Farm contract news, which fair, it's brutal. But Allstate has been running the exact same playbook and somehow flying under the radar.

On their last earnings call the CEO straight up said AI is already selling policies directly in three states. His actual words were something like "AI can also just sell directly." Not assisting an agent. Selling. They've got a whole agentic AI platform they're building this around.

And that's on top of everything they've already been doing with Transformative Growth. They've been cutting agent commissions for years, pulling routine customer service out of local offices, and forcing agencies onto company-controlled phone systems so corporate sees every call.

The part that should scare people is the direction the agency model is going. The whole plan is to make agencies 100 percent sales. No service, no admin, none of that stays in the local office. Which means agents are expected to let go of their support staff and just become a pure new-business machine while AI and the call centers handle everything after the sale.

Think about what that actually means. If you don't own the service relationship anymore, you don't really own the customer. The carrier does. You're just the person who closed the deal, and they can adjust your cut whenever the math stops working for them.

State Farm at least did it loud at a convention. Allstate is doing it slow and quiet, one earnings call and one policy change at a time, so there's no single moment for people to get angry about.

Anyone here actually an Allstate agent dealing with this right now? Curious how it's landing on the ground versus how it reads from the outside. Is it as bad as it looks or am I missing context?

If you somehow missed it: State Farm is moving all 19,000 of its agents onto a single standardized contract, ending their deferred-comp/retirement program (AIPP), and dropping health insurance for agents and spouses. Agents are reportedly looking at 30–40% less on base commissions depending on contract and book size. I can't believe State Farm disputes that number but hasn't offered its own. The core shift is from getting paid to retain a book to getting paid to write new business. They also put buyout offers on the table with a Sept 30 deadline.

P&C side, I know. But the lesson isn't carrier-specific and it's the thing I keep coming back to: you never actually owned that book. State Farm did. And a 20-year "trailing income" promise is only worth as much as the carrier's willingness to keep paying it which turned out to be "until it's inconvenient."

The part that should get every agent's attention is the direction, not the one carrier. Comp is going performance-based across the board, trailing/renewal-style income is getting squeezed, and AI is going to absorb more of the service and retention work that used to justify those trails. The "come build a $3–5M book and coast" pitch a lot of us were sold is quietly being retired.

So I'm genuinely curious how the room sees it:

Are you seeing comp pressure at your carrier/IMO too, or is this a State Farm-specific overreach?

Does owning your book independently actually protect you here, or is that just trading carrier risk for lead-cost/chargeback risk?

For the newer agents is anyone factoring "can they rewrite my deal in 5 years" into where they sign?

Not trying to dunk on State Farm agents since a lot of them got blindsided and it's a rough spot. More interested in what this says about where the whole comp model is heading.

Been in the industry going on three years now, moved between a few IMOs, and picked up pros and cons from every shop I've been at and every shop I deliberately avoided. One pattern shows up over and over: when an agent or agency is unprofitable, it's almost never a talent problem. It's a structure problem. And I feel like it usually comes down to three levers.

1. Compensation rate. A lot of agents are grinding at a comp level that mathematically can't work. If too much of every deal is going up the chain before it gets to you, you can outwork everyone and still bleed. Know your grid and know what's normal for your production level, a lot of people are leaving points on the table they don't even realize exist. For brand new agents, 80% is solid.

2. Persistency. This is the quiet killer. You can write a ton of business and still lose money if it doesn't stay on the books. If you don't have training, systems, and a backend process keeping policies in force, you're funding chargebacks with your own time. Persistency metrics matter as much as raw production, and almost nobody talks about it until it's too late.

3. Lead spend. The worst position in this business is a crazy drive and nothing to dial. But the flip side is overpaying for leads until the math collapses. There's a wide range of lead models out there, the goal is matching your spend to your stage so you're not torching capital before the book matures. 8-10x return is normal for good lead systems regardless of skill.

The reason I bring it up: most "I'm not profitable" posts get answered with "work harder" or "you're not built for this." That's lazy advice. Profitability in this business is an equation, comp in, persistency retained, lead cost out. Fix the structure and the same effort suddenly turns a profit.

Curious what others here have seen, which of the three has been the biggest leak for you?

Been in the industry going on three years now, moved between a few IMOs, and picked up pros and cons from every shop I've been at and every shop I deliberately avoided. One pattern shows up over and over: when an agent or agency is unprofitable, it's almost never a talent problem. It's a structure problem. And I feel like it usually comes down to three levers.

1. Compensation rate. A lot of agents are grinding at a comp level that mathematically can't work. If too much of every deal is going up the chain before it gets to you, you can outwork everyone and still bleed. Know your grid and know what's normal for your production level, a lot of people are leaving points on the table they don't even realize exist. For brand new agents, 80% is solid.

2. Persistency. This is the quiet killer. You can write a ton of business and still lose money if it doesn't stay on the books. If you don't have training, systems, and a backend process keeping policies in force, you're funding chargebacks with your own time. Persistency metrics matter as much as raw production, and almost nobody talks about it until it's too late.

3. Lead spend. The worst position in this business is a crazy drive and nothing to dial. But the flip side is overpaying for leads until the math collapses. There's a wide range of lead models out there, the goal is matching your spend to your stage so you're not torching capital before the book matures. 8-10x return is normal for good lead systems regardless of skill.

The reason I bring it up: most "I'm not profitable" posts get answered with "work harder" or "you're not built for this." That's lazy advice. Profitability in this business is an equation, comp in, persistency retained, lead cost out. Fix the structure and the same effort suddenly turns a profit.

Curious what others here have seen, which of the three has been the biggest leak for you?

Anyone else feel like the bubble's about to pop?

Been in telesales life/FEX for a few years now. When I started it was basically the Wild West, almost anything flew. Feels very different lately (in a good way).

The space got flooded. Way more agents than ever, and a lot of them got onboarded with poor training, no real leadership, and sketchy or non-compliant leads. Which means chargebacks and rolled-up business everywhere, and that hits carrier profitability hard.

I'm seeing carriers respond by pushing people to as-earned, pulling advances, or just cutting agents loose. Sat with some carrier reps in person last week and they said the same thing, tolerance is way down.

The part that gets me is the shops doing massive production, eight or nine figures a year, with 30% placement and 30% persistency. That does nothing for the carrier. They lose money on the product and the agent both. Not sustainable, and the carriers know it.

So genuinely asking the room: how soon are we going to witness the mass exodus of poor quality, unethical insurance agents?