AnnuityNet, a Virginia-based e-commerce platform that aims to link insurance company underwriters of annuities with the broker-dealers and IFAs that distribute them, claims to have processed more than $2 billion in annuity transactions during 2001. Owned by a consortium of financial services companies, including GE Equity, Lincoln Financial Group, Conning Capital Partners, SunLife and Bank One, AnnuityNet was founded in 1997.
Though AnuityNet is not the only provider of e-commerce solutions to annuity distribution, the company reckons it is now market leader in terms of dollar volume. “In 2002, we expect to be seeing close to a half-billion dollars a month moving through the AnnuityNet platform,” said AnnuityNet founder and CEO Shane Chalke, a former actuary. “As more banks, broker-dealers and carriers continue to come on-board and begin using our technology, we believe that figure will grow substantially.”
Annuities are a famously cumbersome, paper-driven and over- regulated product on both sides of the Atlantic. AnnuityNet aims to provide an STP solution from application to delivery. “One good reason why AnnuityNet technology is being adopted so widely in this market space,” observed Tom Christian, AnnuityNet Sr. Vice President and Chief Information Officer, “is that our approach wasn’t built on cumbersome legacy mainframe systems. AnnuityNet designed from the ground up a system that uses the best Internet technology to power the sale and servicing of annuity products. We were free to innovate, and we’ve delivered a functional, highly scalable and robust system perfectly aligned to the real-world requirements of financial institutions and insurance carriers.”