➤ Artificial intelligence is a priority for Principal and should help the company attract and retain customers, CEO Deanna Strable said.

➤ Strable said insurers should "step back" and make sure their value proposition is being communicated in the right way after the killing of UnitedHealthcare's CEO.

➤ Making insurance solutions easily accessible and relevant to customers is one of the biggest challenges facing the life insurance industry, Principal's top executive told S&P Global Market Intelligence.

Deanna Strable, Principal Financial Group Inc.'s new CEO, has held various leadership roles at the insurer over the course of her 35-year tenure at the company, including the CFO position. Strable assumed the role of CEO in addition to her current duties as president this month.

S&P Global Market Intelligence recently caught up with Strable to talk about the biggest issues facing life insurers, regulatory challenges and her thoughts on the impact of the calculated killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson.

The following conversation was edited and condensed for clarity.

S&P Global Market Intelligence: Where do you think your leadership and strategy may differ from your predecessor?

Strable: I've been co-architecting a lot of our priorities. I was involved in really all of the hiring of team members at the executive level. From a strategy and a team perspective, I wouldn't expect a lot of changes.

What role do you see artificial intelligence playing at Principal?

Obviously, the advances in AI have been significant over the last 12 to 24 months. We are investing, but we want to continue to make that a priority and really leverage that technology in the most strategic areas that have the most impact to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency with how we interact with our customers.

Over time, I think it will actually help grow our ability to attract and retain customers as well.

Principal has had pretty strong sales of its registered index-linked annuity (RILA) product. Do you anticipate being able to keep the momentum going there?

We have a strong momentum but you know I'd say it's measured relative to some of the big players in the annuity business.

Our primary focus of RILA is really to meet the needs of either our proprietary financial planners — we have 1,200 advisers across the US — and also to meet the needs of the 14 million retirement participants on our platform. Many of them are unadvised and many of them, as they approach retirement, are looking for solutions that can help them have income in retirement, and RILA and variable annuity and annuity products in general are great matches for that.

What impact are you seeing from cuts in interest rates?

Ultimately, we are not sensitive to interest rates. Our sensitivity is minor from both a liquidity perspective, an earnings perspective as well as a capital perspective. That's something we did deliberately as we think about risk management for the company.

One place where it does have some impact is on our asset management business. If you look at the last few years where interest rates have been in historical highs, actually retail customers have not had to look at asset management solutions to provide higher level of income or yield. They could go to their local bank, they could do a [certificate of deposit]. As consumers and customers are seeing that the signs are pointing more toward lower interest rates than higher interest rates, we have seen more of an interest in some of our asset management capabilities. Also we are a large real estate asset manager and ultimately lower interest rates are positive for that business as well.

Could you look back over your career, as a woman in finance, has the industry always felt like a welcoming place to you?

I think that welcoming approach is two-way: You have to lean in to being welcomed, and then the people have to welcome you. The last three roles I've had, including the CEO role, would all be roles that historically women within the industry have not had a lot of exposure to.

The culture of Principal for decades has been very focused on making sure that we have diversity of thought and diversity of styles because we think it represents our customers and ultimately allows us to make better decisions.

Probably the place within the industry where I still see probably a little bit of a skewness toward males is within the sales organization. We started a women in sales initiative over a decade ago to ultimately allow our women sales professionals to have an environment to share challenges, learn best practices, and really see a supportive environment within the company that allows them to thrive and be successful.

In January we'll have a new presidential administration with a new set of priorities. What impact might have on the way Principal conducts business?

We've excelled in working across a variety of political and policy environments. The good news is if you come back to two of our primary areas of focus, one being working with small and medium-size businesses, and the other being really engaging and encouraging retirement, those are actually two agenda items that are very bipartisan.

Our focus is going to be continuing to lean into our priorities that help our customers. If we focus on what helps our customers, not what helps us as a company. Ultimately, I think there is a path to continue to be very constructive as we work with Washington and making sure agendas move forward.

I think probably the uncertainty is tax policy, and it's probably not as much corporate tax policy. But if you think of many of our products and solutions, whether that be retirement, whether that be insurance, there are tax advantages on products that ultimately lead to our customers buying them. But as the administration really looks to understand how to pay for some of their priorities, we will be very disciplined both on our own but also working with the American Council of Life Insurers and our trade organizations to make sure that they understand the benefit of those tax advantages. That will be a primary focus for us.

What do you see as the biggest challenge facing the life insurance industry?

I go back to how do we continue to make our solutions relevant and acceptable to potential customers around the globe? I do think what we do is very important work … but we need to continue to make that accessible and easy and make the value proposition of those solutions resonate more with the current generation of customers, which is different than how it resonated with generations that proceeded them. To me, that's the biggest challenge.

Just a few weeks ago we saw the CEO of UnitedHealthcare killed in a pretty calculated and brutal attack followed by a wave of internet blowback of anger toward the health insurance industry, and sometimes CEOs in general. How are you thinking about all of this as you yourself move into the CEO role of a major financial institution?

The first thing I would say is it was an inherent tragedy. We're actually partnered with UnitedHealthcare. I also serve on a public board of a health insurance company, and we were just in New York a few weeks prior to doing our investor day and so I think the combination of all of those has made this tragedy even more personal as we think about what we do.

Ultimately, there's two pieces of this. On the security perspective, every company is relooking at making sure that they're doing the right things to protect not just their executives, but any of their employees that have some type of a risk. Having said that, I'm not sure anything could have prevented this from happening because the individual wanted this to happen.

And then I think on the other front, which is the outpouring of, I think, anger for the health insurance company. I think what we have to remember is we have to be up front with the benefits we do provide. I think sometimes what social media can grasp is all the examples of things that maybe are more challenging for individuals to understand, again gravitating to a claim that was denied.

How do we make sure that the benefits that we are providing is as out there as the challenges and then how do we make the challenges actually become easier? I have conversations on the personal front ... of how health insurance has helped people because they were able to get a treatment or a drug or whatever, but those aren't the stories that are out there. So ultimately, I think every company has to step back and say how do we make sure our value proposition is being communicated in the right way again.