Laura Prieskorn took the long way to the bell

The bronze girl has her hands on her hips. So does Laura Prieskorn. In a photograph taken outside the New York Stock Exchange, Jackson's chief executive stands beside Fearless Girl, facing a building draped in her company's purple banner. The pose is playful; the occasion required rather more paperwork. Jackson was becoming an independent public company after decades inside Britain's Prudential.

It is an unusually useful corporate photograph. There is the institution, all columns and stone. There is the company name, large enough to read from across the street. And there is the executive, seen from behind, looking at the result. Prieskorn shared the image again four years later, recalling the moment and the work that had brought Jackson there.

By October 2026, the photograph has acquired another meaning. Prieskorn has handed the president and CEO positions to Don Cummings and moved into an advisory role through December 31. Her retirement closes a career of more than three decades at one company. Yet the route through those decades involved considerably more movement than that description suggests.

The familiar executive biography travels upward: bigger title, larger office, better view. Prieskorn's story is more interesting when read across. Before she became the person representing Jackson on the exchange floor, she worked in the functions that made the business run. Customers, systems, operations and the people connecting them were her preparation for the public stage.

An education in how the place works

A small detail from 2005 catches the eye. Prieskorn was already vice president of Jackson National Life's Customer Service Center, overseeing inquiries from consumers and producers across product lines. She was also working toward her bachelor's degree at Central Michigan University. Responsibility at work and formal education were running alongside each other.

She was involved in integrating Life Insurance Company of Georgia, too. Integration is a wonderfully tidy word for work that is seldom tidy. Two sets of procedures, customer expectations and operating habits have to become something people can actually use. Her assignment placed her close to the practical consequences of a corporate transaction, where announcements turn into questions someone must answer.

Central Michigan later identified her as a 2011 graduate when it reported her appointment as Jackson's CEO. That sequence gives her career a particular texture: the degree arrived well into a working life. It also complicates the polished assumption that education happens first, experience second, and leadership follows at a respectable distance.

Her later responsibilities widened to include technology, operations and information security. As chief operating officer, she helped develop Jackson's operating platform. These are the parts of a financial business customers tend to notice most when something fails. Successful operations often earn the strange reward of appearing effortless, leaving the work that produced them largely out of sight.

Jackson's contact center received Service Quality Measurement Group's Contact Center of the Year award in 2019 and 2020, during her time as COO. Those awards belong to the people doing the work as well as those directing it. For Prieskorn's biography, they offer a concrete marker of the service business she led before taking responsibility for the whole enterprise.

The sideways route

Prieskorn has described lateral moves as a way to learn different functions. Her mentor George Napoles, Jackson's first CIO, brought her into discussions across departments and introduced her to other leaders. She has credited that exposure with shaping her career, and described her own inclination toward problem-solving as an “engineering mindset.”

That phrase fits the route. A system becomes easier to understand when you have seen where its components meet. The handoff between departments can reveal more than the department chart. A leader who has worked across those boundaries has a better chance of recognizing a problem that arrives wearing somebody else's job title.

There is a modest comedy in the idea that career progress might require moving sideways. The corporate ladder has very little room for that maneuver. Prieskorn's experience offers a broader floor plan: learn another part of the company, acquire another perspective, and give future decisions more than one place to begin.

“Moving laterally can unlock significant growth opportunities.”

Laura Prieskorn

Seven months to a different company

She became CEO in February 2021. Jackson's planned separation from Prudential was already underway. In September, the company completed the demerger and emerged as an independent business. Taking charge meant leading an established organization while helping it assume a different corporate identity. The customers still needed service while the ownership structure changed around them.

The sequence matters. Prudential shareholders approved the demerger on August 27. Jackson announced completion on September 13, with regular trading expected to begin on September 20 under JXN. Prieskorn rang the ceremonial bell on September 27. The photograph outside the exchange belongs to that wider passage, rather than a single morning when everything suddenly became new.

At her appointment, Jackson put costs, capital, cash and franchise value among its priorities for independence. It is an accountant's quartet, without much music in the wording. Together, however, those priorities describe an exacting assignment: operate efficiently, preserve financial capacity, produce usable cash and maintain a business customers and distribution partners want to use.

Prieskorn entered that assignment with experience across Jackson's executive, investment and product committees. An internal appointment can look uneventful beside the arrival of a celebrated outsider. Here, continuity had a practical application. The company was changing its relationship with its parent; its new CEO already understood a substantial part of the organization beneath the transaction.

The numbers have several stories to tell

Her final full calendar year as CEO produced $19.7 billion in retail annuity sales in 2025, up 10% from 2024. The mix included $10.9 billion of variable annuities, $6.9 billion of registered index-linked annuities and $1.9 billion of fixed and fixed index annuities. Those figures describe the business she was handing over, with several product categories contributing to its sales.

Sales alone make an incomplete report card. Jackson recorded a $17 million net loss attributable to common shareholders for 2025, while reporting $1.6 billion in adjusted operating earnings, a non-GAAP measure. Both belong in the picture. A large sales number can be impressive on a page while still requiring the reader to turn to the financial statements.

The distinction is useful when assessing a chief executive's record. Products sold, operating performance, accounting results and money returned to shareholders answer different questions. Treating them as interchangeable would flatten a business whose central task involves managing obligations over time. Prieskorn's work sits in that less photogenic territory, where growth has to coexist with financial discipline.

Her 2025 shareholder letter emphasized product development, distribution, customer support, investment capabilities and risk management. Read beside her earlier career, the list has a recognizable shape. These are connected operating functions, each dependent on decisions made elsewhere. The executive who learned the company across departments was now explaining the company through those connections.

There was also ice cream

Then there is the other sort of company gathering. In a post about the 2025 Jackson Gives campaign, Prieskorn described attending an appreciation event at the Lansing headquarters, greeting people, scooping ice cream and handing out company gifts. Chief executive is a broad job description. Occasionally it includes dessert service.

The campaign raised $799,500, including Jackson's two-for-one match, for 24 nonprofit partners. More than 540 associates participated. Those details give the afternoon some weight beyond the pleasant photograph. The beneficiaries were linked to the places where Jackson employees lived and worked, particularly Lansing, Chicago and Nashville.

A separate account of the 2026 National Sales Meeting described associates assembling nearly 6,000 hygiene and snack kits for 64 schools in Nashville and surrounding counties, in partnership with Communities in Schools Tennessee. A sales gathering had begun with a service project. It is a specific glimpse of how the organization used time together.

For a profile of Prieskorn, these occasions add scale of a different kind. An exchange listing measures a company's arrival in public markets. A local campaign measures what employees choose to support nearby. Her public accounts give attention to both. The executive outside the stone exchange building also appears among community partners in Lansing.

A final change of seat

Jackson announced the succession plan on July 22, 2026. Cummings, its finance chief, would become president and CEO on October 1; Brian Walta would succeed him as CFO. Prieskorn would remain an advisor until the end of the year. The timetable made the handover a process with an overlap, rather than a departure compressed into a farewell message.

Her response was personal and brief: “Serving as CEO has been an incredible honor.” She expressed gratitude to colleagues and confidence in the two executives taking on new responsibilities. There was no need to invent a dramatic rupture. The transition arrangement gave an experienced successor access to the person whose work he was inheriting.

The New York Stock Exchange's September 15, 2026 closing-bell program listed Prieskorn as the executive ringing for Jackson. Five years after independence, the company was back at the podium. Within weeks, her title would change. The bell provides a neat pair of bookends, although the career between them resists being reduced to two ceremonies.

Return to that photograph with Fearless Girl. Its charm comes partly from the borrowed pose, partly from the distance between a familiar corporate ritual and a moment of visible play. The banner announces an institution. The woman looking up at it had spent years learning its workings. For someone considering the next career move, that may be the detail to keep: there can be a great deal of ground to cover inside one company.