Are we there yet?
Recently, we’ve been looking at the Annuity services on offer from the quotations portal providers and seeing how these facilities have improved.
In the past, obtaining an accurate illustration, for example, for an Open Market Option (OMO) has proved relatively difficult. Primarily, the difficulty has revolved around the annuity provider needing to be able to flex the rates at short notice (as result of competitive or financial issues) and so being reluctant to distribute large rate tables to third parties. The result of these inhibitions meant that the comparative engines tended to use illustrative results rather than penny accurate, individual quotations.
With the advent of real-time gateway links to insurers, annuities have been added to the portals’ repertoire – this trend has increased recently with new services on offer from the major providers like Assureweb, Exweb and Webline extending their services to take into account impaired lives products etc.
What is surprising from my perspective is the lack of the ability to write the business electronically – there are, admittedly, a couple of issues here:
1. There are no industry standards for the collection of data for annuity business;
2. A number of the providers have not built any ecommerce links into their annuity processing systems;
3. Still a large percentage of OMO business never leaves the providers’ premises and so doesn’t warrant ecommerce investment.
But what it does show, is there is still way to go in trying to change business processes, both by the provider and the intermediary, to embrace cost-efficient, electronic routes to market – isn’t it about time these sorts of facilities are a matter of course?
Written by Nigel Smith - Visit Website