Scott Perry, CEO, AmeriLife

July 2026 — Invest: spoke with Scott Perry, CEO of AmeriLife, about the company’s growth strategy, the integration of new capabilities across the platform, and changing client expectations around retirement planning. “Consumers want more holistic advice. Rather than working with three different advisors or going to three different places, they increasingly want to work with one organization or one trusted advisor who can help meet their needs across the full range of retirement concerns,” Perry said.

What progress has AmeriLife made on its partnership and acquisition strategy?

It continues at a steady drumbeat. We are always looking for strategic fits with strong leaders and entrepreneurs who want to leverage the AmeriLife platform. We stayed on that path, and 2025 was particularly eventful, not because of the number of acquisitions, but because of their size. We welcomed 10 new affiliates to the platform, including Crump Life Insurance Services, which was the largest acquisition in our history.

That transaction was especially significant because Crump brought more than $200 million in revenue and was larger than the business I took over 10 years ago. It was a very strategic acquisition for us. We acquired it from Truist Insurance, and the Crump name is well known in the industry as a leading brand in wholesale and retail distribution of life insurance products. 

It also helped round out our capabilities across financial services. We already had strong positions in senior health, ancillary health, investments, and annuities, but Crump brought scale to life insurance, completing the final pillar of our strategy.

That strength showed up in our results. We ranked as a top three distributor with six of our wealth carriers and as a top-three distributor with seven of our top health insurance carriers during the 2026 Annual Enrollment Period. That helped drive our revenue to $1.3 billion in 2025, with EBITDA of over $400 million. Since I have been here, the company has set new revenue and EBITDA records every year, and 2025 was no exception.

As the platform grows, how are you keeping it cohesive and delivering consistent value for both clients and advisors?

Early on, we launched an initiative to integrate our back-office functions and create a common platform for shared services. That includes functions such as HR, legal, IT, and finance. Standardizing those functions across our businesses helps create efficiency and supports a common culture across the enterprise.

The second piece is aligned incentives. Our partners benefit from the success of the businesses they operate, but they also have incentives to support the growth of the larger enterprise. We have been intentional about ensuring they receive recognition and compensation not only for growing their own businesses but also for contributing to AmeriLife as a whole.

The third piece is technology. Two years ago, we began a major effort to stitch together business processes and workflows across what I would call the middle office. That is helping us extract synergies across the platform and better connect product needs with the specialization of our various businesses. 

So the formula has really been shared services, aligned incentives, and deeper integration of technology, workflows, and processes.

How are client needs around retirement planning changing, and how is AmeriLife adapting?

What we see very clearly is that consumers want more holistic advice. Rather than working with three different advisors or going to three different places, they increasingly want to work with a single organization or trusted advisor who can help meet their needs across the full range of retirement concerns.

Those concerns tend to fall into four categories. The first is healthcare. People want to understand what happens to their healthcare as they retire and how they will cover those expenses. The second is whether they have saved enough. They want guidance on whether their assets and Social Security will be sufficient, especially if they plan to work less or stop working altogether.

The third concern is how to protect what they have accumulated and turn it into income. Many people were more aggressive investors earlier in life because they had time to recover from losses. Later in life, that changes. They want to de-risk their portfolio and create guaranteed income streams that can support them over a longer retirement horizon. The fourth concern is legacy. People want to know how to pass on their assets efficiently or how to avoid burdening their children or grandchildren with debts and expenses.

Our response has been to build a platform that allows advisors working with AmeriLife to access all those capabilities in one place. Whether someone is a health insurance expert, an investment expert, an income specialist, or a life insurance expert, they can tap into the broader AmeriLife platform to serve clients more comprehensively.

At the same time, we are investing in advisor education. Advisors understand that clients want holistic advice, but they do not always feel fully prepared to deliver it on their own. For us, cross-selling is about cross-educating. We help advisors identify their clients’ broader needs and show them how to address them. Even if they are not experts in a specific area, they can still be the quarterback of the client relationship and bring in the right specialist from within the platform.

The other major trend is confusion. Consumers have more information than ever, but that can create just as much confusion as clarity. There is misinformation, conflicting opinions, and no single solution that works for everyone. In many cases, people become so overwhelmed that they do nothing. What we are finding is that most consumers ultimately want a trusted advisor who can cut through that noise and provide solutions tailored to their circumstances.

What new challenges has the business faced in this regulatory and economic environment?

Three major areas remain disruptive. The first is regulation, especially on the health insurance side. In Medicare, regulators are trying to navigate the growing number of people relying on the system and the cost implications of that for society. That affects how they regulate our carrier partners, which in turn affects product design and the economics behind those offerings.

There is also a real need to protect a vulnerable population. Confused consumers can be taken advantage of by bad actors, so there is a level of oversight that we support. Over the last three years, we have taken more steps to be part of the solution by engaging with regulators in Washington, with state governments, and with other stakeholders. We want to help root out bad actors and educate policymakers on what consumers need.

The second area is technology deployment. We continue to invest in best-of-breed technology tools that can unify and standardize processes and workflows across the enterprise. The challenge is not just selecting the right partners but managing the organizational change that comes with implementing those solutions.

The third area is AI. We see AI as a huge enabler that can improve outcomes, efficiency, and performance across the platform. It can allow advisors to spend more time with clients and less time on modeling, paperwork, analysis, and other behind-the-scenes work. The challenge is prioritization. There are thousands of possible use cases, so the real question is where to start in a way that creates meaningful impact and is practical to implement.

What are your key priorities for the next two to three years?

The biggest shift for us is that we have reached a point where we have amassed significant scale and broad capabilities. Now it’s all about moving from scale to value. We have built a diversified and resilient business, and now the question is how to put that scale to work more effectively.

Our priority is unification. We want our corporate office and field operations to function as one enterprise, with shared goals, accountability, and resources. The second is standardization. That means identifying best practices, turning them into centers of excellence, and deploying common technology platforms and best-of-breed tools across the business.

We do not try to be a technology company ourselves. Our model is to partner with best-in-class providers and develop customized versions of their tools to meet our business needs. Data governance is a major part of that. As the company has grown, clean data and stronger governance have become even more important, especially as that data informs decisions and feeds AI solutions.

Ultimately, all of this is about value creation. We create value by improving the advisor experience, which in turn improves the consumer experience. That includes strengthening holistic capabilities through cross-selling and cross-education, and it also means continuing to pursue smart M&A. We do not necessarily need big, bold deals all the time. Sometimes the best opportunities are niche capabilities that fill a specific gap and create more value for advisors and clients.