In joining American Equity Life Insurance Investment Co. in 2009, Jeff Lorenzen was coming back to work for company founder David Noble for the second time in his career.

The first was when Lorenzen joined the Statesman Group in 1989 as a graduate student at Drake University. Noble, who died in 2017, was the insurer’s CEO at the time.

Lorenzen said he first became passionate about the investment field at the University of Iowa, but working at the Statesman Group revealed his passion for “what investing is and how it fits into an insurance company.” 

He then moved to Investors Management Group, where he worked for 17 years and ultimately served as president and chief investment officer. When that business sold, Noble was starting American Equity “from scratch” and brought over many of Lorenzen’s former Statesman Group colleagues, he said. The Statesman Group was sold in 1994 to Indianapolis-based insurance giant Conseco.

Lorenzen said he saw “an organization that had tremendous growth opportunities” in American Equity. 

“[And] it was becoming more sophisticated. What I was doing with Investors Management Group was pretty mainstream assets and liability management. Here, it was getting more complex, and that piece enticed me,” he said.

Lorenzen has grown within American Equity for 16 years, and in May 2024 was appointed CEO  following the company’s acquisition by Brookfield Wealth Solutions. 

Early next year, the company will move its headquarters to the Nationwide building in downtown Des Moines. Lorenzen is also serving as president of the Iowa Soccer Development Foundation, the nonprofit leading development of the proposed Pro Iowa Soccer Stadium and Global Plaza downtown.

The Business Record recently caught up with Lorenzen to talk about his career and leading American Equity in his new role.

This Q&A has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.

What was appealing to you about investing, and particularly in the insurance industry?

With typical investing, you think “I’m going to try and get the best return I can,” and that’s always one piece of it. But it’s the management of the risk on the other side of it. If I have an insurance company, I have a set of liabilities, so I’m trying to match that asset to a set of liabilities so it becomes more of a puzzle and a challenge. And it’s always changing as interest rates change, both the assets and the liabilities re-value, and as a result, you’re always having to stay ahead of where economic actions are going so that you can be in tune with what’s happening in the portfolio. That’s the piece that I found a little bit different than just being a mutual fund manager. While that is also very appealing, this is a little bit more complex because you have a set of liabilities that you have to match against, and there’s rules around it, and I found that to be extremely challenging. One of the things that Investors Management Group did was they had maybe a dozen insurance companies that they managed money for, so each one was different. So now I had a portfolio of insurance companies where I oversaw the asset side and was working closely with their liabilities to create all of these different puzzles, so I had 12 different puzzles I was working on. 

What have been some of your main priorities as CEO so far? Has the acquisition by Brookfield brought any changes to American Equity’s business since last year?

No, it hasn’t. Actually, we’re doubling down on our business, because now we have a partner that is committed to supporting us, not only as a business, but in the community and in Des Moines. Our business is basically four pieces that I focus on, and it’s making sure that we’re recruiting and retaining the right talent and creating a culture that embraces growth and development. I think that’s very important. Our people are our No. 1 assets, and we know that we’re a service type company, so we focus a lot of time on making sure our employees are well taken care of and have opportunities to grow. 

The second piece is ensuring through our financial team that we have a sound balance sheet and are very stable. That’s a very important piece, and I think that’s recognized over the last 15 months. We’ve seen ratings increase from an A minus to an A by S&P, Fitch and AM Best, so it’s a testament that we are creating that stability, and it continues to improve. The third is making sure we have relevant products and we price those competitively. It’s a competitive market. This business has become very complex, and we’re trying to find ways to simplify it. That’s a piece, having relevant products that meet the needs of not only our agents, but our policyholders. 

Then the last is making sure that the organization is investing in technology. We’ve been going through about a 36-month transformation of our technology. We’ve invested a significant amount of money to make ourselves more efficient, be able to meet our clients and our constituents where they want to be met. It’s no longer paper. It’s electronic. We’re looking at contemporary platforms to be able to do our administration more efficiently and effectively, and that’s taken some time. There’s a lot of lift that goes through that, but I think when we end this journey over the next 12 months, we’re going to be elevated significantly compared to where we are and how we can show up and do business. It used to be being able to get a policy out the door and in three weeks, now it’s three days. 

Is American Equity either considering or already implementing artificial intelligence as part of that technology investment?

We have policies around AI as most regulated companies do. Our focus is only on closed source use rather than open source like ChatGPT and those. We don’t like that. It’s on no one’s desk. It creates too much of a potential risk. We do use closed source for specific things around understanding phone calls that come in. We have voice-recognized AI that’ll listen to a phone call, figure out certain keywords, and then be able to put answers to those questions. It makes our service team much more effective, and we can turn calls around much more quickly. We’re using it for analyzing code, so there’s different ways that we can use it to streamline and reduce the amount of work and make it more simple.

Businesses are currently experiencing economic uncertainty from multiple sources. As an investment and insurance company, where is American Equity seeing the biggest effects?

Most of what goes on with the economy that impacts us is interest rates and volatility. As interest rates come down, we have to re-evaluate how we credit those policies, so we have to be dynamic in our pricing when we price those products. Typically, once they’re priced, we like to hold those prices as long as we can, because that’s what we’ve sold. We do have the option to adjust those if markets get really extreme but typically we like to hold it through the cycle as best we can. But day-to-day, we’re always looking to see what’s going on in the economy, and then we have to go in, and we try not to do it often, but we’ll have to go in and reprice. A cap may be 9% and now it’s 8% because interest rates have come down and the cost of that cap is more expensive. So we’re always looking at costs versus return on those things, and the same thing on the asset side. If we’re investing on behalf of policyholders and the earned rate that we can get on our investments comes down, we can’t afford to have the same benefit to the policyholder. We have to move those in tandem, so it’s this tug and pull type dynamic that we have with the assets and the liabilities and pricing those and managing those. That’s the art of the business. 

As a leader, how do you manage uncertainty? Are there indicators or areas you monitor for changes that could affect the business?

I think the things that would cause tension for us would be big movements in interest rates because it really has an impact on our assets and our liabilities and how we price. That’s something that we keep an eye on. It doesn’t slow growth, it just changes how we have to think about growth. The other is if we were to get into a period of fast expansion, and it was hard to find talent. That’s a challenge for us. It seems like we’re kind of on the other side now with interest rates coming down, there’s this sense that things may be slowing. That creates opportunities for us to find good talent and bolster our largest asset, which is our employees, and especially as we’re transitioning downtown, we’ll have more space to be able to support the collaboration of those people all under one roof. Regulation is always something that we keep an eye on. There’s a regulation out there that’s pending from the Department of Labor called the DOL rule. It’s those types of things that we always have to keep on the radar. But from our standpoint, we’re at a point where we have opportunities for tremendous growth, and while I wouldn’t say we’re recession resistant, demographics are such that still allows our products to be very attractive for the foreseeable future. I think that’s one of the things that Brookfield saw appealing in our company is there is a lot of upside.

As American Equity looks for opportunities to grow and hire new talent, what is your overall outlook on Iowa’s job market?

I think the job market is good. We have very good relationships for new talent coming out of each of the universities. We do the job fairs, we show up as an organization. There’s certain pockets that are more challenging, like actuarial, the specialty skill sets are more challenging. We’re having to hire people and bring them into Des Moines from out of town. But we’re starting to see more people adaptive to moving to Des Moines rather than you always wanted to be remote. “I want to be remote. I want to stay home.” No, we want people to be in Des Moines and be part of the commitment. I think the job market remains pretty good. I think our average days to hire is 30 days, so we’re seeing our ability to attract talent and get them onboarded fairly quickly as a positive sign that the market remains pretty good for us.

The Business Record recently wrote about the record pace of executive leadership change happening in Central Iowa. As one of those leaders who has transitioned to a new role and spent much of your career in Iowa, how have you seen community leadership change in Greater Des Moines?

I’m just starting to network with a number of the new leaders coming in with the various organizations. I’ve had relationships with the previous leaders, so I’m starting to get to know those [new leaders], but I do really believe from my involvement with other CEOs, other leaders, that they are committed to seeing Des Moines be successful. They understand the challenges the city has, whether it’s around finding new ways to create economic development, tackling housing issues, or addressing public school revitalization. Leaders are stepping up in different ways to take those on, and I find that inspirational from my own standpoint because I have passions for those. I will be very active in a number of those initiatives, not only in terms of economic development through us being downtown and supporting the [Pro Iowa] soccer stadium, but we want to support the homelessness initiatives that are going on. There’s this group of leaders already spending a lot of time on that. We are committed to help support that initiative downtown. I think that’s critical.

The Des Moines Public Schools revitalization — I think it’s important that we have well-educated potential employee candidates coming out of Des Moines, not just the suburbs. We haven’t made an investment in Des Moines Public Schools for a long time, and I’m personally very supportive. As a company, we don’t take public roles or public investments, but personally, I think it is very important. My kids are Des Moines Public Schools graduates, and it’s something that I think we need to lean into as a community and support. 

(This interview was held on Sept. 24. Lorenzen provided the following statement following the arrest and resignation of former Des Moines Superintendent Ian Roberts: The [school district’s] proposed plan has been in development for several years and is not dependent on any one individual.) 

As American Equity has brought people back to the office and moves to its new office downtown next year, how do you help create a culture that makes people want to come to an office?

We have dress codes and we have the various things that are necessary for a business to function, but we also put out fresh fruit and snacks every week for people so they always feel like they have something that they can go to. We put in new fresh coffee dispensers, we put in some things that people want, but it’s also just showing up and being a good employer. We have food trucks. We do lots of different events that bring the groups together. We have two offices right now, so being able to bring them together is important. Being downtown, we’ll be able to merge those into one office and everyone will be together, which is part of the reason for the move. The other is that we want to support downtown. But it’s just creating that environment, that culture — that caring, compassion culture. 

The team, when they hire, one of the things we focus on in the interview process is: Do you fit the culture? And then do you fit the job description? Because the culture is important. We want people to be kind, open, inclusive in the way that we do business, and I think we’ve created that environment. We’re starting to get that feedback from employees that we like where it’s going, we like the feel. And we’re seeing that in our retention numbers, and that’s important. That’s a sign of success for me.

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At a glance

Age: 60

Hometown: Burlington, Iowa

Education: Bachelor’s degree in finance, University of Iowa Tippie College of Business; Master of Business Administration, Drake University

Career History: American Equity Life Investment Co.: CEO (May 2024-present); executive vice president and chief risk officer (2021-2024); executive vice president and chief investment officer (2009-2021). Investors Management Group, fixed-income portfolio manager and later president and chief investment officer (1992-2009). The Statesman Group, mortgage-backed securities and credit analyst (1989-1992) 

Family: Two children, Emmett and Cecille 

Contact: jlorenzen@american-equity.com 

Editor’s note: This article was updated at 6:15 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 21 to correct the name of Brookfield Wealth Solutions.