Joining Forces
Annexus and North American joined forces to revolutionize sales processes with a unified experience from illustration to e-application with FireLight
Client Success Story
North American & Annexus
North American Company for Life and Health Insurance® is a member of Sammons® Financial Group, Inc. They offer a comprehensive portfolio of term, universal life, and indexed universal life insurance products, as well as a wide variety of traditional fixed and fixed index annuities.
Annexus designs solutions to help Americans grow and protect their retirement savings. Annexus develops market-leading fixed indexed annuities and indexed universal life insurance products.
GOAL:
Partner to successfully launch an annuity product suite with a seamless sales experience.
SOLUTION:
FireLight e-application and illustration software
RESULT:
- Achieved a connected and streamlined sales process
- Created a centralized platform from which to execute both illustrations and e-applications
- Quickly attained advisor adoption of a newly launched product suite
- Increased frequency of advisors self-running illustrations by 30%
- Improved speed of illustration data capture and ability to act on insights
North American Company for Life and Health Insurance (North American) and Annexus teamed up to create the new Secure Horizon Fixed Indexed Annuities product suite from scratch. Their goals were not just to create a new product. They wanted to make selling it as streamlined and accessible as possible. This led both the carrier and distributor to expand their digital sales capabilities.
North American and Annexus were both long-time users of Hexure’s FireLight sales automation platform. As they began collaborating, the conversations were not limited to e-submission. They began to discuss the platform’s illustration capabilities and what it could mean for the product’s potential.
Combined Ambition
Annexus is one of America’s leading independent annuity design and distribution companies. They are known for developing new products in partnership with carriers. These products are kept exclusive to Annexus’ downstream distribution channels, creating new sales opportunities.
Annexus had one such project in mind when they approached North American.
“We had wanted to work with North American for a long time,” said Jeff Jumpe, Annexus’ senior vice president of technology. “And we had a vision for a new product that they were a perfect fit for. The time was right.”
It was no surprise North American was on Annexus’ shortlist. The carrier has more than a century’s worth of history in the life insurance and annuities industry and boasts an A+ financial strength rating from AM Best.
After Annexus and North American finalized the product design—a new fixed indexed annuity suite called Secure Horizon—they needed a strategy to deploy it.
Making Connections
Initial meetings focused on making the sales process fast, easy and frictionless.
“We brought the idea to Annexus of using FireLight for illustrations in addition to e-applications,” said Lonny Koehlmoos, North American’s AVP of business intelligence.
Adding FireLight illustrations would unify the sales process by allowing advisors to complete both the illustration and e-application inside the Annexus advisor portal.
“Our goal from the beginning was to create the ideal experience for Annexus advisors,” said Jumpe. “A one-stop shop to run an illustration, show it to the client, modify the case as needed and seamlessly move into the e-application.”
North American worked closely with Hexure to implement FireLight illustrations. Then, the carrier deployed the new product to Annexus.
From Annexus’ standpoint, rolling out FireLight illustrations was a seamless process. They had already built single sign on (SSO) from their user portal into FireLight for e-applications. It required simply repeating the process to activate illustrations.
“Our goal from the beginning was to create the ideal experience for Annexus advisors.”
New Process Pays Off
Both companies are seeing new efficiencies and elevated user experiences. Advisors now get a seamless flow from illustration to e-application within the Annexus Advisors’ Portal. The frictionless digital process provides the modern sales experience today’s advisors and clients expect.
All data entered for the illustration carries through to the application. This saves advisors from manually re-entering data.
“The e-application is typically 95% complete by the time the advisor gets that far,” said Jumpe.
FireLight also prevents keying errors that lead to not-in-good-order (NIGO) applications, saving both firms time and money on NIGOs.
From a back-office efficiency standpoint, Annexus and North American are set up to receive real-time illustration data from FireLight. Both parties are putting this information to good use.
“We can report the data back to our sales and executive teams to look for leading trends in sales,” said Jumpe.
“Instead of getting bulk metric files once a day, we now get the data instantly,” said Koehlmoos. “We look forward to automating the process even more by feeding the data directly into our customer relationship management (CRM). This will provide us actionable sales intelligence in real time.”
Winning the Popular Vote
One of the most important benefits of this product’s connected sales process has been advisor adoption.
“The volume of illustrations run for the new product ramped up very quickly,” said Koehlmoos. “Advisors get one experience, and one look and feel between all the sales activities in FireLight. This has been key.”
Annexus credits FireLight’s consistent user interface (UI) as one of the main drivers of advisor adoption.
“We have had a lot of advisors tell us they like the user interface,” said Jumpe. “Many of our advisors were used to FireLight for e-applications, so there is a comfort level with illustrations.”
Look to the Future
Going forward, North American and Annexus will continue to make product enhancements to the Secure Horizon suite. Any changes North American makes will automatically be pushed to Annexus advisors through FireLight.
North American also has plans to roll out FireLight illustrations to other distribution partners after the successful project with Annexus.
“We have this amazing success story to share with our other partners,” said Koehlmoos. “The connected experience. The consistent UI. The centralized place to execute the sale. Advisors love it.”
Annexus looks forward to seeing continued growth in efficiency.
“Working with Hexure on both illustrations and e-application has greatly improved the operational efficiency of our downstream distribution channels,” said Jumpe. “The process is easy, simple and seamless. We can see the positive effect this is going to have for our business in years to come.”
“The process is easy, simple and seamless. We can see the positive effect this is going to have for our business in years to come.”
Deliver a Unified Experience
Want to deliver a seamless illustration to e-application experience? Hexure can help with FireLight.
