Few things capture Brooks Tingle’s approach to being a longevity warrior like watching him walk on stage in a dark suit jacket and custom Air Force 1 sneakers earlier this month. The CEO of John Hancock was there to kick off the company’s 3rd annual “Longer. Healthier. Better” symposium for brokers, dispensing the kind of common sense one might expect from someone who’s spent the bulk of his career at a life insurer founded in Boston 164 years ago. Not for him the magic elixirs and fads of his biohacking brethren. Tingle, 60, is a man who thinks about actuarial data and probabilities, about how to transform a largely transactional business that’s betting on your lifespan into a partner in boosting your health span, or how long you’ll live well. “Of course it’s good for the business,” he says, “but I’m also passionate about this stuff.”
Added Tingle: “I didn’t want to be just another financial services company that did an annual survey that waves their finger at everyone Americans saying you’re not saving enough for retirement. You need health and wealth but there’s much more to preparing for a long life.”
That’s how every life insurer makes money—by selling you policies in which you can afford to pay them more than they’ll ever have to pay you. It’s a relationship that customers tend to maintain for more than two decades and yet it rarely extends beyond the act of purchasing a policy. As he put it: “A lot of these planners tend to talk about a transaction, or to the extent it is planning, it’s around planning around one dimension of what we believe is fulsome preparedness to live a longer, healthier, better life.”
Tingle’s goal is to encourage those sellers to become enablers of longevity and build deeper (and more profitable) relationships with customers by giving them incentives to invest in their own longevity. He’s partnered with consumer health-tech companies like Oura and Prenuvo, and also featured ClearCardo, as well as the foundation of Damar Hamlin, a Buffalo Bills player who had a cardiac arrest during a game three years ago, who funds CPR training and external defibrillators in youth sports. “It truly shifted my perspective on life,” Hamlin told Tingle during the conference. “We all have our platforms…you have to lead where you are.”
For Tingle, three years of building out a platform for longevity have prompted some internal reflections on what it means to grow old. “I’ve been at Hancock for 35-plus years now,” he said. “Simple math says there are fewer of those years ahead of me than behind me in terms of this version of my career, and I plan to stay as long as they’ll have me.”
“We have this gift that, frankly, most of our grandparents, and their parents and grandparents, didn’t have, which is decades of life after your first act professionally,” he told me. “If I leave at 65, 67, and live to 87 or 97, I think, ‘What the heck am I going to do?’”
Does he have an answer? Not yet. But he’s living healthier and “I’m certainly going to be prepared.”
