Trogni’s vision for Zinnia is industry standardization and full-stack, in the literal sense: “I strongly believe you cannot fix data and technology from the middle down. You have to start at the origination point…Our goal is to ensure that every family in North America has the financial longevity to match their wellness and health longevity.”
If you ask Zinnia CEO Michele Trogni about transformation of the insurance industry, she’ll answer in the same disarmingly practical register she uses to recount a career that moved from the heights of Swiss banking at UBS to the vanguard of financial services at Markit.
It’s an MO that couples well with the drive to transform industries she’s brought to Zinnia, which enables carriers and distributors to build, sell and service insurance, with the goal of helping people get the coverage they need and the service they deserve.
Unlike many startup CEOs though, Trongi has less of a singular obsession with disruption and more a respect for infrastructure and an appreciation for building the “plumbing of the financial world.”
“We used to call ourselves the plumbers of financial services,” she said of her time at Markit, now IHS Markit, not with irony but with pride, in building the rails that move billions of dollars, less visible perhaps than other flashy financial products, but indispensable. “Before we built them, it was like all the plumbing that served the industry better needed to be plumbed in one way as opposed to everybody building it themselves.”
Trogni’s route through the jungle of global finance began in Britain. Her core career was in banking for 25 years, starting at UBS, where she worked her way up to become Group CIO, and she helped the company through the global financial crisis which tore through the markets in 2008, requiring a massive rethink of banking, coupled with changing regulatory regimes.
However, Trogni was ready to pursue what she felt would become a dominant positive force in banking–financial technology. She decided to join Markit, where she led portfolios focused on data insights, analytics, and transformative technology solutions for financial markets.
“The thing that excited me about being in financial services was the amount of technology and the way it changed the shape of the industry over time,” Trogni said. “Once the financial crisis was through, there was a huge push in financial services to essentially think about technology, data, and the business in a totally different way.”
But not every financial services company could afford to build up an entire technology infrastructure themselves. That led Trogni to think about what differentiated Markit and what technology it could build versus what it should buy from people who built it best.
Across Worlds: Banking, Fintech, Insurtech
While at Markit, Trogni oversaw a transition from startup to IPO and on to a blockbuster merger with IHS. That company then merged with S&P Global in 2022.
After leaving the company, the mother of four children decided to take a few years to be more present for them, but also to do board and advisory work. She ended up on the board of life insurance company Global Atlantic, where she found them wrestling with the problem she had spent a career solving: building technology with a focus on life insurance and annuities.
“It was an interesting business, and there was a huge opportunity here to replicate what was done in financial services, but in life annuities,” Trogni said.
She described life annuities as “very complicated products” in terms of both the number of attributes that are associated with an annuity or life insurance product, and the timelines; these products can last for decades. But, the industry was years behind even the banking industry in its approach to digital transformation.
“You can buy insurance products and you have to hold it for like, 30 or 40 years, or you buy an annuity and it can last you for the next year, 10,15, or 20 years,” she said. “However, the infrastructure was horrendous. There was no one good at building this technology.”
Reimagining Insurance Infrastructure: From TPA to Technology Backbone
The opportunity was not for an incremental tweak, but a systems overhaul. While on the Global Atlantic board, she met Todd Boehly who leads Eldridge Industries as chairman and CEO. The conglomerate also launched Eldridge, an asset management and insurance holding company last year, which has about $74 billion in assets under management. At the time, the company owned a business called SE2, which had been around since 2005, traditional TPA (third-party administrator) focused on streamlining carrier solutions.
“I was so intrigued by this business that when I met Todd Boehly, we discussed reimagining what it could be, and that’s how Zinnia came to be,” she said. “That’s also ultimately how I started with the toe in the door, first as advisor, then chair of the board, and then CEO.”
Together, they saw an opportunity to reimagine the business that would become Zinnia, as the backbone of a modern life insurance and annuity industry — a platform, an essential rail system, not just a service provider.
Under Trogni’s leadership, Zinnia was rebuilt as an end-to-end company to serve carriers from origination through multi-channel distribution and into post-sale servicing. The multi-channels can be through a bank, broker-dealer, independent marketing organization, or registered investment advisor.
“We help them build products and put them on multi-rail distributions,” Trogni said. “We then essentially help them distribute that product and then service the products thereafter. We don’t do everything for everybody, but the connectivity that we built in this kind of three-sided ecosystem puts us in the position as the backbone to make the industry work more efficiently and the consumer from having a terrible experience.”
It is that integration effort, which relies on data standardization and connectivity, that helps consumers better understand life insurance and annuities.
“If you have a life insurance policy, most people say, ‘Oh, it’s stuck in my drawer,’ Trogni said. “Our perspective is, if you make things transparent, if you make the experience great from the minute you think about buying something, people will trust it more, and they will buy more.”
Standardization as Revolution
The vision for Zinnia is ambitious and more fundamental than simply creating new, bolt-on products.
“We believe so strongly in standardization,” Trogni said. “If you can create the data standards — and connect them end-to-end, the entire industry works more efficiently, for carriers and consumers alike.”
Her analogy isn’t that of a trendsetter but a utility architect: making rail lines run smooth, with every stop and connection mapped out, so no traveler is left stranded by a different set of rules at every terminal.
This conviction comes from a hard-won understanding of where scale and improvement arise.
“A lot of people skip the step and say, ‘We can just join up the data here, here, and here,’” she said. “The truth is, when data flows front to back in a uniform, consistent way, everybody can rely on that same data.”
The long-term goal is nothing less than what she calls financial longevity, or ensuring that every family’s wealth lasts as long as their health.
Technology as the Enabler, Not the Star
For all her advocacy of data and digital, Trogni bristles at the tendency to treat technology, especially artificial intelligence, as a thing unto itself, disconnected from real-world value. The breakthrough, in her view, isn’t in the buzzword itself, but in the demystification and democratization made possible by AI and analytics.
“[Technologies like] AI and analytics around data make it easier to explain to people in simple terms what those products do for them,” she said. “Recommending the right product has never been easier, whereas before, some advisors avoided recommending these retirement products because they didn’t trust the product.”
In addition, technology has the ability to deliver transparency and education, Trogni said. The end goal is for a consumer to avoid having to enter the same information multiple times across carriers or when buying more products.
Zinnia is building technology that can embed that information into a carrier’s system or utilize an applications processing interface (API.) It is “integration technology at the core,” according to Trogni and something she believes is differentiated in the market as “a system of record on top of a distributed ledger.”
This is important because Trogni said the insurance industry, for years, was “littered with these failed conversions, or difficult conversions of old data.” Instead, Zinnia envisions a world where every transaction can sit in its system of record and is designed to make the process behind the scenes seamless.
The real test is how invisible it becomes for end-users, the consumers, and advisors.
Growth by Design: Acquisitions, Distribution and Marketplace Thinking
In October 2024, Zinnia, which was already backed by funds managed by KKR, closed on $300 million in financing from Vista Credit Partners. In an interview with CNBC, Trogni said that funding would be used to grow the company with a focus on go-to-market.
Trogni’s vision for Zinnia is full-stack, in the literal sense: “I strongly believe you cannot fix data and technology from the middle down. You have to start at the origination point.”
That strategic stance led to the acquisition of a number of companies, including LPS Group’s comprehensive illustration systems; Policygenius, which unites origination, illustration, underwriting, and order entry under one digital highway system; and most recently, Ebix’s Life and Annuity business. All under the goal of making the purchase of life and annuity insurance products easier, faster, and more accessible, Trogni said.
“We now talk about how we become dominant in distribution,” she said. “It’s very difficult to break into distribution if you’ve got nothing. It’s the ‘jewel crown of the industry,’ so your technology has to be so much better that people are willing to rip it out and put something else in. That’s why we acquired Ebix.”
Ebix, in particular, helped Zinnia to amass an approximately 60% share of the annuities market overall, and a client base of nine out of the top ten banks using their tools.
Forever Building
But platform building is never finished. Why? Only 51% of American adults reported owning at least one life insurance policy as of 2024. On the other side, 42% of adults are uninsured or underinsured, which roughly translates into about 102 million people without life insurance or feel they need more.
In addition, in the CNBC interview, Eldridge CEO Todd Boehly said annuities “is one of the biggest industries in the world,” and that $400 billion worth of annuities products are expected to be sold in 2025.
To do that, Trogni is surrounding herself with people who can help Zinnia grow. Three months ago, Jason Pizzorusso joined as chief financial officer to lead its financial strategy and operations as Zinnia continues to scale. He was most recently president of B2B financial technology DriveWealth.
In March 2025, the company brought on former Goldman Sachs president and COO Gary Cohn as vice chair and board member.
Trogni views Zinnia’s future not as a quest for breadth for its own sake but as “more of the same, just better.”
That includes expanding into the RIA wealth channel, onboarding legacy policies from ancient mainframes onto modern rails, building ecosystem trust, and possibly, one day, branching into reinsurance or international markets.
“People are starting to think about retirement products more holistically, not just one product or another,” she said. “Those are the things that we are committed to delivering.”
