1. EPACS ANNUITY WIZARD Bryan Eshelbrenner Director of Product Management
Ebix
Hi Everyone,
I’m Bryan Eshelbrenner from the Ebix team and I’m here to talk a little about how we’ve partnered with Docupace to make transacting Annuities less expensive and a better experience for everyone involved.
Before we dive into how we’ve done that, by a show of hands, how many people here are with an organization that does a fair amount of annuity business?
OK, good, I’m in the right place. How many primarily use check & app? How many of you primarily use a clearing platform? How many are using ePACS?
Now, again by show of hands, how many people feel that, relative to other business you transact, annuities are a bit of an expensive headache?
Alright, that is a fair number too. For those that didn’t raise your hand, let me give you an overview of what I see when I look at how annuities are getting transacted today.
Advisors know they can make more commission by not using the clearing firm platform, so they are searching around for the applications forms and printing them out.
Sometimes they aren’t event fillable PDF’s so their staff is hand-writing ALL the information onto the form
Then the producer has to track down the client and get them to put a signature on their printed out, hand-written forms
The client also has to find the checkbook for the right account or get a money order and handle the initial funds like we all live in 1997.
All that paper has to get stuck into a manila envelope and sent by premium shipping service to the broker dealer home office compliance department to be ripped open and put in a pile with other paper applications.
That department has to inspect each of those handwritten fields in excruciating detail to make sure the application is in good order before sending it on to the manufacturer and then they have to scan the paperwork into their books and records system.
Since so much of this work is being done manually and on paper, we’ve injected enough human error into the process to create a very expensive NIGO rate.
And weather it’s in good order or not, this whole process is slow enough to give the producer anxiety about their sale going through, which means they are calling into the home office trying to get confirmation the application was approved.
For our clients, our advisors, our compliance team members, and our leaders watching the bottom line, what we deal with today is frustrating, inconsistent, poorly supported, and most of all, a dumpster fire into which we throw our limited time and money.
And that’s exactly the kind of problem that Ebix and Docupace exist to solve. When it comes to financial services, we want to turn the awful realities of yesterday into the delightful visions of tomorrow. Ebix is the leading vendor when it comes to annuity exchanges. And Docupace’s expertise in managing document images, streamlining compliance workflows, and creating great user experiences is the perfect pairing for our annuity exchange technology.
Processing annuities through ePACS will speed up the application process with a streamlined interface for both the advisor and the compliance officer that is consistent with the process for opening brokerage and custodial accounts. Universal account opening. The overall approval process is also accelerated by leveraging AnnuityNet’s real-time In Good Order checks. Through our partnership, we will save you money by still placing the business direct to the manufacturer, while eliminating all the soft and hard costs of the check & app process. And beside the excellent user experience that will delight your advisors and compliance offices, we aim to impress them with a level of customer support they don’t typically enjoy in enterprise products.
Let’s take a look at how this will work for advisors. Here we are in the ePACS system on a new work item that represents an annuity application. Normally from this point we would add forms and step through the PDF’s until they were filled out completely. Now with our annuity application wizard, we are walking through a single workflow that covers all necessary forms. Every piece of data available in ePACS is used to pre-fill as many fields as possible and any additional data is only requested a single time. This wizard knows the manufacturers’ application rules and each answer shapes what questions are asked on the subsequent screens. So we arrive here at the finalization screen with the absolute minimal amount of work.
Once the wizard application is finalized, the data is mapped into the completed PDF forms. The ePACS platform can then work its magic to handle the signature process and deliver the forms to the compliance officer, who has a much easier job now that the rules behind the application wizards has done everything technically possible to assure it’s in-good-order.
When this application is approved and submitted, the AnnuityNet exchange will submit the business directly to the manufacturer and trigger money settlement through DTCC. And here we are on the ePACS dashboard screen, we provide visibility into the status of annuity transactions along side all your other transactions through this single pane of glass.
This new, easy option for annuity account transactions will be available for ePACS customers this year. It is a core component to the ePACS platform that you’ll be able to enable for your organization as a configuration feature. We are signing up early adopters now, so please connect with all of us tonight and tomorrow to see how you can get involved.
Thank you, and have a great rest of the conference.
DEMO = embed link