By Jim Ferrell, VP, FireLight Product Management, Insurance Technologies

In the life and annuity space the majority of business is transacted by independent advisors. These are advisors whose primary focus is to provide suitable investment advice and deliver value to their clients.

An independent advisor firm, also known as an independent broker-dealer, is one who typically relies on insurance carriers technology for automation. To further define, independent advisor firms would normally not have their own technology team focused on building automation technologies for their own advisors. Nor are these firms able to engage and purchase existing cost-prohibitive automation platforms as this business model simply will not meet their financial goals.

While front-office and back-office business processing automation for the annuity business has been successful at the larger wire focused broker dealer firms, this success has not migrated successfully into the independent advisor space and the reasons why are varied and complex. Read more…