Ben Cruikshank maintains that the gap between the annuity tech tools RIAs have in theory and the tools they really have is wide.
Cruikshank is the president of Flourish, a financial technology firm that's owned by MassMutual and launched an annuity distribution arm in January.
Cruikshank said in an interview Wednesday that he thinks RIAs' lack of awareness of or use of the right kinds of tech tools is a top reason for disappointing RIA channel growth.
In spite of all of the talk of the RIAs offering fee-based annuities, "adoption is effectively zero," he said.
What it means: If Cruikshank is correct, and the right technology takes root, RIAs could still become a major annuity distribution channel.
Flourish: Flourish was founded by Stone Ridge Asset Management as an RIA tech firm in 2017.
MassMutual bought it from Stone Ridge in 2021.
Flourish Annuities: Cruikshank says he became interested in RIA-oriented annuity distributions after some advisors discovered that they would like to offer multi-year guaranteed annuities but could not do that.
Independent marketing organizations had figured out how to help traditional annuity agents and brokers sell annuities using systems that the traditional producers could live with.
The situation on the RIA side was different.
An RIA told him that, even though MYGAs looked like a great product, "we cannot touch these things."
The RIA was not licensed to sell annuities, and insurers could not feed MYGA products into the system he used to manage clients' other assets.
Flourish then started a four-year effort to create a system that could sell annuities directly to consumers and feed annuities into the same systems RIAs use to manage the rest of their business.
Flourish is now appointed to sell annuities from MassMutual, MassMutual Ascend and Aspida, a life insurer formed in 2019 with backing from Ares Management.
