Your Clients Still Have Retirement Savings Holes to Fill: Kevin Mechtley

Kevin Mechtley is about to become an annuity designer at a company that’s been hungry to offer your clients annuities.

Sammons Financial has named him vice president of business development and chief innovation officer for the independent annuity channel.

Sammons is a West Des Moines, Iowa-based life and annuity issuer that’s part of a bigger, family-owned conglomerate.

Sammons’ built a new headquarters campus about two years ago. It has introduced a wide range of annuities and annuity features since then, including a three-year, non-variable indexed annuity; a non-variable indexed annuity that incorporates an environmental, social welfare and corporate governance (ESG) index; and the annuity-issuer power behind RetireOne’s Constance “contingent deferred annuity,” or a lifetime income spigot that can be bolted on to just about any plain vanilla retirement savings portfolio.

Mechtley has been Sammons’ government affairs director.

Before Mechtley moved to Sammons, he was an attorney at companies such as Aviva USA and Athene USA.

He has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Kansas and a law degree from Washburn University.

He holds the associate, Life Management Institute, professional designation, and a Wine & Spirit Education Trust Level 2 certificate.

He talked, via email, about how he sees his new role.

1. What are your top priorities for your first 90 days?

First and foremost, we are looking to maintain a high volume of product development activity across all of our distribution channels.

I look forward to helping formalize our process and resources needed to grow new product ideation as well as optimize our distribution channels and opportunities.

I can’t wait to get started.

2. Your background is in government affairs and the legal side. What makes you suited for this role?

I’ve always thought success in politics is the ability to cut through the noise and ensure your message reaches the target individual level.

I view success in this role largely the same way – part of my job is to leverage all the great insights of our business intelligence teams, our distribution partners, and our data resources to anticipate where the market is headed and then ensure the product solutions we develop reach the target individual level.

What gaps exist today in retirement and income planning?