How Life and Annuity Sites Phone Home

Ecosystems fueled by APIs help advisors by offering a seamless customer experience and fostering relationships.

Consumers benefit from better experiences and personalized offerings, which leads to increased retention, referrals, and satisfaction.

2. Holistic Financial Views

Traditionally, information about life insurance and annuities holdings has existed separately from investment and other financial reporting.

That makes it difficult to create and offer a comprehensive customer view, sometimes leading customers to question why they even bought those products.

APIs, however, enable life insurance and annuity ecosystems to seamlessly interface with investment ecosystems providing advisors and their clients an integrated view of financial portfolios.

The impact is profound because a comprehensive view facilitates more informed discussions and decisions between advisors and their clients.

At the same time, consumers are reminded of the value these products provide in their overall financial plans.

3. Administrative Burden Reduction

By retrieving data from systems and data sources, APIs can help dramatically reduce the administrative load for agents and brokers, giving them more time to do the important work of managing relationships with both life and annuity providers and the contract holders.

APIs enable advisors to access and update customer and prospect information – ideally in real time – and offer similar self-service options to consumers.

In addition, APIs can link to broker/dealer systems to interface with suitability requirements making it easier to manage fiduciary responsibilities and risks.

With fewer administrative duties, advisors have expanded capacity for revenue-generating activities.

APIs help ambitious insurers steamline a customer-centric offering essential to improving today's functionality while enabling tomorrow's innovation.

Karen Valdez is head of life and annuity product marketing at EIS, a company that operates a cloud-based digital platform for the insurance industry.