Why Aren't More RIAs Offering Annuities? Flourish President Blames Weak Tech

Conversation May 16, 2024 at 12:45 PM
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What You Need To Know

  • In theory, RIAs all know about and have access to great annuity sales support tools.
  • In reality, Ben Cruikshank says, nah.
  • He says the proof is in the sales data.
Ben Cruikshank

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.

Flourish can feed annuity data from multiple carriers straight into RIAs' wealth management systems, and it offers an outsourced insurance desk that can execute the annuity purchasing transactions without triggering advisor fear of client poaching.

The thinking: Flourish points to sales reports showing that RIAs may account for less than 0.5% of U.S. individual annuity sales.

Aspida, for example, generated $2 billion in annuity sales in 2023 but just $30 million in sales through RIAs, according to Chad Burns, the insurer's chief distribution officer.

Cruikshank said that, in spite of all of the news reports about rapid advances in annuity distribution tech, RIAs that try to offer annuities still run into a system that relies heavily on big PDF files, the U.S. Postal Service and transactions that take several weeks to complete.

Today, he said, an RIA can move 1,000 clients' cash from one mutual fund to another with a few clicks.

The RIA might have to face a 40-page prospectus and a 45-minute client discussion to sell one annuity.

"Then there's still, 'Mail in a paper check at the end of it,'" he said.

RIAs could simply refer the clients who need annuities to annuity agents, but "they want to be at the center of their clients' finances," Cruikshank said.

Even if the RIAs could overcome competitive concerns, he said, they may resist working with an outside company because they and the clients believe that an advisor should simplify a client's finances and centralize management of the client's financial arrangements in one place.

A new, tech-focused annuity issuer like Aspida has easy-to-use, responsive systems that help advisors complete transactions quickly, Cruikshank said.

"The rest of the industry has a lot of catching up to do," he said.

Correction: An earlier version of this article described Aspida's history of acquisitions incorrectly. 

Credit: Meta/Adobe Stock

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