The Insured Retirement Institute (IRI) is a member-driven association.

Except as otherwise indicated below, all member company employees are welcome to join as many committees and working groups as they would like, and there is no limit to the number of member company employees who can participate in any particular committee or working group.

Visit your IRI account to manage committee and working group participation.

IRI Operations and Technology Committees

Digital First Steering Committee

This group is made up of executive level members from carriers and distributors that desire to create digital-first financial professional experiences. The long-term goal of the committee is to ensure annuities are easily supported across various platforms and alongside traditional investments in the tools financial professionals use. There are three desired outcomes this group will strive to achieve: i) Provide a digital-first model eliminating the critical friction points from the financial professional experience and decreasing the time to issue and remove the hassle from the experience ii) Embed lifetime income products in the platforms and tools used by financial professionals. iii)Maximize the ROI for the technology spend to support real-time data.  

Meeting Schedule: Monthly calls

Criteria: Invitation only

IRI Staff Liaison: Katherine Dease

Operations and Experience Optimization Senior Steering Committee

The IRI Operations and Experience Optimization Senior Steering Committee (SSC) provides a framework to strategize and prioritize initiatives focused on removing friction from the experience by improving speed to issue and reducing cycle times in all phases of the annuity journeyThe subcommittees that report to this group include: Experience, Go-to-Market, and Process and Regulation. 

Meeting Schedule: Quarterly calls

Criteria: Invitation only based on participation in Operations and Technology discussions.

IRI Staff Liaison: Bryan Harmelink

Operations and Technology Committee

The Operations and Technology Committee provides a place for members to receive updates on the work being completed throughout the Ops and Tech committees and subcommittees The committee supports the retirement solutions industry with digital-first for annuity operational efficiencies, standardization, and elimination of friction in the annuity journey 

Meeting Schedule: Bi-monthly calls

Criteria: Open to all IRI member company representatives.

IRI Staff Liaison: Katherine Dease

Platform Ecosystem Steering Committee

The Platform Ecosystem Steering Committee prioritizes and leads the roadmap for real-time digital-first capabilities needed to support annuities alongside traditional investments inside of the portfolio management and wealth management platforms. The subcommittees that report to this group include: Platform Support and Holistic Planning with Annuities.  

Participating firms and subject matter experts report to the Digital First Steering Committee for final approval.  

Meeting Schedule: On-Demand calls

Criteria: Invite only based on participation and prioritization of planned digital-first initiatives.

IRI Staff Liaison: Katherine Dease

IRI Operations and Technology SubCommittees

Experience Subcommittee

The Experience Subcommittee reports to the Operations and Experience Optimization Senior Steering Committee. The subcommittee is focused on digital first experiences for the consumer and financial professionals within the existing sales channels. This group strives to eliminate frustrations and deliver efficient solutions enabling financial professionals to easily work with the tools and solutions where they manage their business and work with consumers.

The Experience Subcommittee objectives for 2024 include improving cycle times and not-in-good-order rates so that annuities are transacted more easily and faster. After evaluating options for speeding up transfers and eliminating suitability slowdowns, the group voted to pause additional measures and to focus on supporting implementation of Paperless Replacements through Go-To-Market.

Meeting Schedule: Monthly & On-Demand calls

Criteria: Open to all IRI member company representatives.

IRI Staff Liaison: Bryan Harmelink

Go-to-Market Subcommittee

The Go-to-Market Subcommittee reports to the Operations and Experience Optimization Senior Steering Committee. The subcommittee is focused on promoting the adoption of current e-Solution best practices and Digital First for Annuity Standards. Initiatives like the dashboard, blogs, webinars, and playbooks are created to drive advancement and track progress of digital and electronic solutions. 

Meeting Schedule: Monthly & On-Demand calls

Criteria: Open to all IRI member company representatives.

IRI Staff Liaison: Bryan Harmelink

Holistic Financial Planning with Annuities Subcommittee

The Holistic Financial Planning with Annuities Subcommittee reports to the Platform Support and Digital First Steering Committees. The subcommittee is addressing financial professional concerns around modeling annuities in financial planning tools and visualizing the value of the annuity in the plans. The top financial planning tools are working with the IRI community to make modeling annuities easier for financial professionals that know little about annuities. Roadmap items include: off-the-shelf baseline values, education of the annuity value, and the creation of cash flow reports and visualizations showing the secured income alongside the portfolio income.  

The objective of the group is to increase financial professionals modeling annuities in their holistic plans.  

Meeting Schedule: Weekly

Criteria: IRI member firms working with financial planning tools and interested in attracting more financial professionals to use the tools.

IRI Staff Liaison: Katherine Dease

Platform Support Subcommittee

The Platform Support Subcommittee reports to Platform Ecosystem Steering Committee and Digital First Steering Committee. The subcommittee addresses the real-time digital-first capabilities needed to meet the financial professionals in the platforms that support annuities alongside traditional investments.  

The objective of the group is to define and guide a framework to support the digital first standards in a scalable, manageable, and agile way. Participating firms and subject matter experts will define, create and implement real-time digital-first standards that enable annuities to be supported as part of a portfolio.  

The guiding principles of this group are digital-first, real-time capabilities allowing firms to build the standard once and use it in many places to foster innovation and superior engagement.  

Meeting Schedule: Weekly

Criteria: IRI member firms interested in prioritizing, defining, and building digital-first, real-time capabilities to support annuities inside platforms alongside traditional investments.

IRI Staff Liaison: Katherine Dease

Process and Regulation Subcommittee

The Process and Regulation Subcommittee reports to the Operations and Experience Optimization Senior Steering Committee. The subcommittee. This subcommittee, in conjunction with the Compliance and Implementation Committee, examines regulatory requirements impacting the consumer and financial professional annuity experiences  

This group proposes alternative best practices and solutions to improve the regulatory hurdles and represents Operations and Technology in the ongoing conversations around DOL and Standard of Conduct. 

Meeting Schedule: On-Demand calls

Criteria: Open to all IRI member company representatives.

IRI Staff Liaison: Bryan Harmelink