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Preston Pitts, PresidentTo some organizations, an annuity be treated like a just a piece of paperwork. To the person buying it, it can represent thirty years of work, a child's education or the question of whether life after work will look the way they imagined.
Legacy Marketing Group works with insurance carriers, independent marketing organizations (IMOs) and financial professionals to provide retirement and insurance solutions designed around those real-life needs.
Since its inception nearly 35 years ago, Legacy has put people and relationships at the center of its work, generating more than USD 24 billion in annuity premium since 1993. Yet its leaders do not point first to products, technology or scale when discussing the company's success.
They point to their people, relationships and willingness to listen.
“We went from a transactional mindset to basically collecting and embracing and understanding that everything we do impacts people's lives,” says Preston Pitts, President.
This philosophy defined how Legacy approaches its work. The company built its model around supporting the people responsible for helping consumers make important financial decisions, rather than viewing insurance distribution as a series of transactions.
From Selling to Supporting
Legacy's growth brought it closer to the financial professionals responsible for translating retirement products into real-world financial solutions. As the company began working with several thousand producers and their IMOs, it gained a clearer view of the responsibility that comes with supporting the people who advise American consumers.
Those producers were often having difficult conversations about retirement, savings and financial security. Legacy began focusing on how it could equip them to serve clients more effectively.
Dominic Cursio, Chief Marketing Officer, saw the company from the other side of the business long before joining it. He spent much of his career working in the IMO space, where Legacy had developed a reputation for transparency, honesty and commitment to its partners. From that vantage point, Cursio saw a philosophy that had remained consistent for decades. Legacy's relationships were built around the way it treated its partners instead of simply the products it brought to market.
Listening as a Business Strategy
Retirement planning has always changed. The difference today is that the pace of change is accelerating, shaped by evolving consumer expectations, technological advances and shifting economic conditions.
Legacy's response is surprisingly old-fashioned: listen.
The company listens to its IMO partners and producers and pays attention to what those professionals hear from their clients. Feedback shapes products, services and relationships in practical ways. Legacy pays close attention to how IMOs, producers and their clients experience working with the organization, from the first interaction through the life of the relationship.
Legacy has remained flexible and adaptive, with the autonomy to influence the experience for both the carrier and the client. The approach also shapes product development, where the company looks for smaller changes that can have a meaningful effect on consumers.
For example, a recently released product includes valuable benefits for consumers who experience the inability to perform two out of six activities of daily living, an area associated with long-term care needs. This can help clients plan for future extended care costs.
“We want our products to continue to have a competitive edge that is responsive to the ever-changing consumer challenges that they face,” says Pitts. “We've gone from always trying to make major changes to sometimes making some very impactful but subtle changes to our products.”
People at the Center of Service
Ask Legacy what separates it from competitors, and the obvious answers might be its full-service sales and marketing platform, carrier relationships or technology. Cursio points to something else.
“Legacy’s differentiator is the people of Legacy,” he says.
Service becomes particularly important when a financial relationship encounters a problem. An application can move smoothly until someone needs an answer or an issue crosses organizational boundaries. Legacy's approach is to stay involved until the problem is resolved.
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We went from a transactional mindset to basically collecting and embracing and understanding that everything we do impacts people's lives.
Cursio describes the philosophy as “ownership of the problem.” Employees are expected to take responsibility for communication, follow the issue and see it through to resolution.
The approach is supported by Legacy's focused carrier network. It chooses its carrier relationships deliberately, looking for financially strong organizations with favorable renewal rate integrity, indicating they treat customers well, respect independent distribution and remain willing to adapt products as market needs change. The company works with roughly four to six carriers rather than 20, allowing its teams to develop closer relationships with each partner and collaborate when an issue involves multiple organizations.
Fewer carrier relationships also give Legacy greater familiarity with the people and processes involved. When a producer or client encounters an issue, the company can work directly with its carrier partners and not leave them to manage multiple handoffs.
Technology That Supports the Relationship
Technology has changed insurance distribution dramatically in recent years. Legacy sees data as one of the biggest opportunities, but it is less interested in technology for its own sake than in what it allows producers to do.
The company's technology strategy is an extension of its service model. Producers need timely information to make decisions, carriers need greater visibility into distribution activity and consumers benefit when financial professionals can access useful information without unnecessary friction.
Legacy has a multi-carrier agent portal that helps producers and IMOs manage day-to-day business. Since the company works with a focused group of carriers, producers can manage those relationships through a more consolidated environment.
The practical advantage is reduced fragmentation. A producer does not have to approach every carrier as an entirely separate business relationship.
“Legacy is really actively working with our carrier partners to not only ensure that our distribution partners have the data, but they can analyze it effectively,” says Cursio.
Electronic processing has already become a significant part of Legacy's business, creating efficiencies across the distribution chain. The company expects its technology footprint to expand as new tools emerge and carrier partners continue investing in their own platforms.
Technology, however, still has a clear job to do. It must make the experience easier for the producer and more useful for the consumer.
Building the Next Chapter
Legacy's next chapter will bring its people-first philosophy and technology strategy closer together. The company plans to work with outside organizations to gain better insight into changing consumer behavior. That research will help shape future products as Legacy pays greater attention to younger generations of savers and the financial needs that will define their lives.
The aim is not to replace the human side of insurance distribution but to strengthen it. Legacy can use data to understand changing needs, technology to reduce friction and its relationships with carriers and producers to turn those insights into practical solutions.
That approach brings the company's philosophy back to where it began: the person behind the policy. After three decades, Legacy remains focused on making the insurance distribution experience work better for the people who depend on it, from the producer delivering advice to the consumer planning for the future.
For that approach, Legacy Marketing Group has been named Top Insurance Marketing Organization of the Year 2026. The recognition reflects a model built around a simple idea. Behind every policy is a person, and behind every producer is a customer counting on someone to get it right.
What Makes an Insurance Marketing Organization Work for Producers
IMOs act as a bridge among carriers, financial professionals and customers; therefore, their involvement in the process of distribution becomes essential. A carrier might have good products, but it will fail to succeed in distribution if its producers face trouble managing more than one carrier or waiting too long for responses from them. The main criteria for evaluating different IMOs by executives will be efficiency in distribution, combined with the ability to keep product discipline and provide adequate service.
The connection between IMOs and carriers should be considered. Though the variety of carriers looks advantageous at first glance, it cannot guarantee that the partnership is efficient and that problems can be easily solved. Buyers should consider how carefully the IMO chooses the carriers, how well the carriers cooperate with the IMO and how helpful they are for the producers in complex situations. Financial strength becomes less significant than behavior at the time of continuing and willingness to work with independent distributors for many years.
The next test is how the IMO turns producer feedback into product decisions. Retirement products rarely improve through large feature additions alone. Small changes in benefit design, administrative handling or access can materially affect whether a product is understandable and usable for the client. An IMO should be able to gather feedback from the field, distinguish recurring concerns from isolated requests and translate the useful signals into product adjustments without adding unnecessary complexity.
Service quality becomes most visible when something goes wrong. Producers need a partner that owns the communication around a problem rather than passing responsibility between offices. Resolution discipline matters because delays are rarely confined to the original issue. They consume producer time and can weaken confidence with the client. Buyers should look for clear responsibility through the life of a case and evidence that the IMO stays involved until the matter is closed.
“Legacy Marketing Group builds product changes from field feedback and trains team members to own problem communication through resolution.”
Technology also determines the economics of logistics today. The important thing is not how many options are available through the IMO, but whether that technology minimizes switching costs and provides more actionable information for the businesses. A multi-carrier portal can have significance where it provides producers a means to handle their case management in a consistent manner among a smaller number of carriers. Information accessed in real time can help in follow-up, but only if such information is based on decision points needed by producers. The same rule applies to digital application processing, where such processing is important when it eliminates switching costs and helps producers manage fewer applications instead of more.
Legacy Marketing Group operates through a highly targeted group of about five to six carrier partners, enabling it to combine product access with the creation of stronger relationships. The multi-carrier agent portal allows for management of all daily operations of IMOs and producers within that set of partners. Legacy Marketing Group builds product changes from field feedback and trains team members to own problem communication through resolution. This addresses the issues of carrier depth and usability by producers, as well as improving accountability. Technology is kept in line with the tasks of producers and not as an end in itself. Legacy Marketing Group is an organization worth considering for such companies.
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