Suzanne Schmitt Email & Phone Number

Connecticut, United States

Hired to refine the firm’s design target; build end-to-end user experiences; create a selling system, strategy and OKR; and help increase conversions.Select accomplishments include:• Clarified and tightened the firm’s value proposition; reframed and realigned needs to outcomes that benefited advisors and three generations of clients and their families. • Built client, advisor and firm experiences; developed a clickable prototype that incorporated needs-based intergenerational family financial planning. • Co-hosted The Family Financial Conversation podcast series on Advisorpedia heard by up to 250k unique visitors monthly.

New York City Metropolitan Area

Delivering a competitive offer in 13 months – the stretch goal I was hired to meet – required strong cross-functional collaboration, vision, and team building. It also required rapid market assessment, market readiness planning and strategic partnerships. By working hard, in lockstep and with humility, our newly formed team delivered a comprehensive financial wellness capability in just 11 months. This mass market offer was the first of its kind, defining wellness as a journey to and through retirement, helping people proactively plan for common financial shocks like health events, and mitigating other common barriers to financial health such as debt and lack of emergency savings. Despite an already crowded marketplace, this new capability attracted seven marquis point solutions partners and key clients representing more than 500k employees/participants for its launch in 4Q23. Additional key accomplishment: Created and led needs-based segmentation that identified roughly 30% more high-potential opportunities; accelerated launch by roughly 3X vs. key competitors.

Hartford, Connecticut Area

When it comes to financial wellness programs, outcomes – material improvements in OKR such as healthcare costs, retirements savings rates and employee retention – are key. And while calculating outcomes was complex and time consuming, not having these proof points stood in the way of adoption. Rather than seeing this as an obstacle, I saw this as an opportunity to leverage business insights, relationships, and agile techniques to automate this process and drive adoption. I drafted a cross functional team and, together, we built a tool that could be used by sales teams, brokers, and employers to model outcomes. This allowed us to demonstrate how adoption of financial wellness capabilities materially improved the metrics that mattered to employers, driving adoption and key client retention (e.g., Cigna), while providing real help to workers of all ages and life stages struggling to improve their overall financial wellbeing. Win-win-win.Additional select accomplishments: • Managed key client relationships; collaborated cross-functionally to help retain the firm’s largest client, CIGNA. • Demonstrated ROI on the firm’s financial wellness capability; allowed Prudential to retain marquis clients and win two new Client Advisory Board members.

Smithfield, Ri

“Pace over perfection” was the NorthStar of our agile transformation. That mindset shift allowed me to experiment with a combination of techniques that enabled us to build, develop and rally the team that delivered complex life event and financial health experiences in less than 45 days. Through cross-functional collaboration with our product, advice, user experience and tech partners, and with plenty of consumer testing and coaching, we served up a scalable, repeatable process that produced the top-ranked life event experiences in the financial services industry. Additional select accomplishments:• Led the aging investor strategy; collaborated cross-functionally to build and deploy practice management modules for family financial planning, develop multi-stakeholder experiences for life events and aging in six months. • Oversaw eMoney planning software deployment – inclusive of advisor training, systems integrations, and practice management materials – in roughly four months. • Mentored SME and technical talent; facilitated career development and progression for three associates during roughly two years.

Radnor, Pa

No one – well, almost no one – wants to talk about aging, running out of money in retirement, or the potential loss of income except the firms that manufacture annuities and long-term care insurance. Yet better understanding consumers’ mindset around these issues could help improve outcomes and arm advisors with the insights needed to successfully navigate difficult conversations. So, I was excited to be recruited to help Lincoln stand up a consumer insights function. As the lead for their individual products, I partnered closely with colleagues in corporate strategy, product, distribution, marketing, and customer service to complete the first needs-based segmentation strategies (customer and advisor), test new feature and benefit combinations for flagship products including MoneyGuard, and build advisor training and practice management resources rooted in primary consumer research and actionable advisor insights. Select additional accomplishments include:• Recruiting analytics talent to drive pricing sensitivity and product feature design.• Completing the first competitive marketscan to identify Lincoln’s unique product positioning.• Prototyping and testing riders that allowed younger, emerging affluent markets to buy into protection products for themselves and aging loved ones.

Master'S Degree, Organizational Leadership

Certificate, Servant Leadership, Completed

Bachelor Of Arts (B.A.), Psychology

Certificate, Gerontology, Completed

Certificates, Elder Financial Abuse Detection And Prevention, Gerontology, Completed