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The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation DTCC) announced today that it has completed the highly-anticipated next phase of enhancements to its Licensing & Appointments LNA) service, one of the core solutions from its Insurance & Retirement Services I&RS) business that automates and centralizes the flow of producer information between insurance carriers and distributors. LNA is a service offering of National Securities Clearing Corporation, a DTCC subsidiary.
These system enhancements are intended to help carriers quickly and easily track and confirm if producers have been trained and certified to sell their specific annuity products.
In this recently completed phase of the project, which was initially piloted in September 2011, I&RS has further adapted LNA to communicate producer state and product training completions to those that need to know this critical information, including producers, training vendors, insurance carriers and distributors.
Phased Rollout
DTCC has been working with seven industry education vendors that provide the product and state-level training curriculums to producers — including Kaplan, PinPoint partnering with LIMRA), QuestCE, RegEd partnering with IRI), Sircon, SuccessCE partnering with NAFA), and WebCE — in order to create a channel through which the data can be received and communicated between carriers and distributors.
In Phase I of the project, which was piloted to customers in April 2011, I&RS began accepting delimited data file feeds of training completions from the education vendors, and translating them into an industry-standard LNA format. The new data fields built into the LNA system were able to accommodate this training data so carriers could quickly verify if agents had been trained and certified.
In this next iteration of the project, which is now in production with 40 distributors and 35 carriers representing over 20 families), DTCC has now extended these enhancements to its distributor customers.
LNA Access
To reach the widest range of distributors possible, these Phase II enhancements have also been added into DTCC's LNA Access Platform, the online reporting tool that distributors use to enter, edit, and retrieve various sets of pre-defined required licensing and appointment data.
"LNA Access expands DTCC's reach by bringing its benefits to distributors who may choose not to develop the fully integrated system," said Lana Macumber, director, I&RS Strategy and Business Development, DTCC. "Firms that use LNA Access will now also have the ability to track and verify completed annuity product and state training, which is an important enhancement to the service."
In the next and final phase of the development effort, targeted to roll out by fourth quarter of 2012, DTCC plans to create a centralized producer management portal that will store and allow access to producer training and sales authorization data. DTCC will leverage ACORD XML messaging to support real-time authorization inquiries from order entry and other transaction processing platforms. In addition, DTCC plans to offer a user interface to request this information through its Access platform.
Managing State-Level Regulations
Within financial services, insurance is a unique business because it is primarily regulated at the individual state level. This means that insurance firms must deal with up to 50 different sets of state regulations and 50 different state regulatory agencies. Further complicating matters, each state law has specific requirements and training deadlines.
This new education component for insurance producers is a result of the state-level "Suitability in Annuity Transactions Model Regulation," introduced in 2010 by National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) model regulation, the U.S. standard-setting and regulatory support organization. The model regulation recommends that all agents must take a four-hour certification course on the fundamentals of annuities, as well as complete product-specific training from carriers for which they solicit annuities.
