duedee.com

ST. PAUL, Minn., Oct. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- After nearly two years of developing new products, processes, and tools for advisors, Securian Financial Group is beefing up its wholesaling staff.

Jeanne Keshishian, CLU, will serve as Securian's national sales vice president for individual life and long-term care insurance. Keshishian began her insurance career in 1990 as an advisor and moved to wholesaling in 1997. Most recently, she was with The Hartford as a regional sales manager. At Securian, she will lead the internal and external wholesalers who will call on Securian's distribution partners.

"We've built our wholesaling team and are expanding distribution to our long-standing career agency network as well as independent advisors and registered representatives of strategic broker-dealer relationships," said Ben Roth, director, Life Sales Support.

Additionally, Andrea Mack, CLU, ChFC, CASL, FLMI, was appointed manager of life and long-term care insurance promotions. She develops and implements promotional strategies and also works with the advanced marketing team to promote advanced sales concepts for Securian's Minnesota Life insurance products. Mack joined Securian in 1998.

External wholesalers added this year include:

-- Todd Michaels, who has been with Securian 11 years, most recently as an internal wholesaler;

-- Erick Ricker, who previously was a life and disability wholesaler for Ameriprise; and

-- Rob Daniel, previously with Prudential, where he was managing director for the state of North Carolina.

Securian also added several new Minnesota Life individual life products in the last two years, including:

-- Eclipse Indexed Life, which offers premium and death benefit flexibility to policyholders and the opportunity to allocate the cash value in either a fixed or an account tied to an index;

-- Advantage Elite Term Life, which offers fully guaranteed level term protection in an array of durations with conversion privileges for permanent life insurance;

-- Accumulator Variable Universal Life, a product that provides a valuable death benefit and features investment choices with competitive expenses from some of the industry's leading asset managers.

"We listened to our field force and put in place the tools and products they asked for," said Roth. "We have dramatically improved our product development speed-to-market capability and created a unique web-based illustration and presentation tool that is loaded with point-of-sale functionality. Our new wholesaling and technology infrastructure allows us to anticipate our producers' needs in this rapidly-changing environment."

Securian Financial Group helps provide financial security for individuals and businesses in the form of insurance, retirement plans and investments. Affiliates include Minnesota Life Insurance Co., Advantus Capital Management, and Allied Solutions, LLC. Securian has $690 billion of life insurance in force, $30 billion in assets under management as of July 31, 2008, and a work force of 3,500 employees nationwide. Securian serves more than 9,000,000 individuals in the U.S. Securities are offered through Securian Financial Services, Inc., Member FINRA and SIPC.