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The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), the premier post-trade market infrastructure for the global financial services industry, today announced that Transamerica, New York Life, Great American and Prudential have adopted DTCC’s Insurance & Retirement Services’ (I&RS) Producer Management Portal (PMP) solution, and Nationwide is targeting a go-live date in September. PMP is a centralized online platform that helps the insurance industry manage and demonstrate compliance with agent training as required by the various states in accordance with the National Association of Insurance Commissioners’ (NAIC) 2010 Model Regulation.
States’ regulations require that insurance agents, also known as producers, complete general training in each state in which the producer sells annuity products, as well as complete training on each specific carrier’s annuity products that the producer sells.
PMP gathers and stores this valuable training completion information and provides carriers and distributors using the service with access to a robust data set in a centralized, online hub.
“Organizations that use PMP have more time to focus on serving their clients. As a result, we’ve seen an increasing number of carriers using the service,” said Kevin Lewis, Vice President and Head of I&RS. “The industry called on DTCC, as a neutral party, to design and implement PMP. We have been gratified to see the tool gain traction and help carriers and distributors navigate complex regulations in a more streamlined way.”
Before the introduction of PMP, firms were challenged with managing and reporting regulatory training data in a timely fashion, hampered by burdensome manual processes and tracking data from multiple education providers. PMP provides a real-time process for obtaining notifications of completed training, offers point-of-sale authorization and includes reporting capabilities that provide evidence of training to regulatory officials.
“Producers can be licensed and appointed in many states and have vast product offerings available to them – making it difficult to keep track of multiple training program completions,” said Eric Michaud, Director of Operations and Relationship Management at New York Life. “Access to PMP helps both carriers and distributors validate training requirements and quickly rectify any gaps in completions so producers can seamlessly complete good order sales, improving their client’s overall experience.”
PMP was launched in May 2013 as an extension of I&RS’ Licensing & Appointments service. It is an automated, centralized solution for the annuities industry to track, share and verify producer training completions. Industry uptake is, and will continue to be the key, according to Lewis. As more carriers and distributors adopt the solution, users will have access to a broader set of data to help facilitate an ever quicker ability to validate producer qualifications and as a result, greater speed towards completing annuity sales.
Several distributors are currently utilizing PMP to manage training completions including: H. Beck, Inc.; Stifel, Nicolaus & Company, Inc.; Robert W. Baird & Co. Inc.
