The Insured Retirement Institute (IRI) this week announced the formation of an “Annuity Data Enablement Task Force” comprised of senior insurance company representatives that will initially evaluate the principles for an ideal financial professional experience throughout the annuity lifecycle.
The task force is charged with creating a plan to bring these principles to life. That may include designing an approach to modernizing data across the industry, including but not limited to delivery methods, standardization where required, and solutions to manage data.
This effort is the latest initiative under IRI’s unique strategic objective to lead the industry in developing digital solutions to meet the rapidly changing product needs and service expectations of financial professionals and consumers.
IRI’s Board of Directors established the task force, which was spearheaded by IRI Board Treasurer & Secretary Paula Nelson, Managing Director & Head of Strategic Growth at Global Atlantic Financial Group.
The task force’s goal is to upgrade the user experience that agents and consumers encounter when purchasing insured retirement products. The group’s initial charge is to examine the desired experiences, and identify limitations caused by inefficient data sharing across industry partners, and where standards would streamline the annuity transaction process for financial advice professionals who sell and service annuities.
The new task force, chaired by Dev Ganguly, Chief Operating Officer at Jackson National Life Insurance Company and member of the IRI Board of Directors, comprises 25 senior executives from participating insurance carriers who will serve as members. IRI’s Chief Technology and Innovation Officer, Katherine Dease, will lead the day-to-day efforts.
A distributor task force is currently being formed and chaired by IRI Board of Directors member Phil Pellegrino, Head of Insured Solutions at UBS. This group will support the insurance carrier task force by adding the distributor perspective to ensure that identified problems and proposed solutions meet the needs of the complete supply chain. Equally as important, solution providers and data enablers are critical to this initiative and will be included in discussions as the process unfolds.
The carrier task force will meet in person at IRI’s 2023 Annual Conference on March 15 to begin aligning on the top problem statements and outcomes. The distributor task force will hold an organizational call shortly after the IRI conference.
