IRI VISION: IRI BASELINE VALUES ARE BRINGING ANNUITIES INTO THE CONVERSATION

Annuities have long been overlooked in financial planning due to complex modeling requirements. Many financial professionals, especially those unfamiliar with annuities, struggled to incorporate them into planning tools. The Insured Retirement Institute (IRI) Baseline Values eliminate barriers to modeling, making it easier to showcase annuities’ value and enhance consumer protection.

The Need for Standardized Baseline Values
“Financial planning is about aligning investment “containers” with clients’ needs, wants, wishes, and goals—not exact product modeling,” said Dana Malesky, Vice President, Platform Relationships at Jackson. “Annuities have been difficult to integrate due to varying inputs like capital market assumptions, participation rates, caps and buffers, and inflation rates. Without a standardized approach, financial professionals either avoided them or faced inconsistent results.”

For annuities to work seamlessly in the tools used by financial professionals, a standardized set of rates and inputs—baseline values—is needed.

IRI: A Unifying Industry Force
Standardizing annuity modeling required collaboration across carriers, distributors, Cannex, and the financial planning platforms used by financial professionals. IRI facilitated this alignment, ensuring a common framework.

Through IRI’s leadership and a partnership with Cannex, carriers and distributors worked together in unprecedented ways to create the foundation needed to make annuities accessible in financial planning tools.

Removing Key Barriers
Adopting IRI Baseline Values removes a key barrier for financial professionals who may not be familiar with annuities. Instead of manually inputting product data and seeing significant variations in results, they can now rely on a standardized set of assumptions.

This allows them to focus on what really matters—helping clients conceptually understand the value of an annuity within their overall financial plan without having to know specific product details. This enables annuities to be included in critical retirement planning conversations.

Financial professionals can more easily model annuities and show their benefits with a consistent framework before diving into specific product selections. Without putting annuities into the discussion, it isn’t easy to help consumers understand how annuities can fit into a financial strategy and help them achieve their goals.

Call to Action: Making Annuities Easier to Model
The industry must now implement IRI’s Baseline Values across financial planning platforms and empower financial professionals to integrate annuities seamlessly and bring them into the conversation to make holistic financial planning truly comprehensive.

Transforming the insured retirement industry is vital to meet the growing needs of workers and retirees concerned about protecting their retirement nest eggs and generating sufficient income that will last. Making annuities easier to model in financial professionals’ planning tools using IRI’s Baseline Values can help ensure that consumers are presented with the right solutions to meet their retirement needs.

Contact: Dan Zielinski

Other Resources: 
Press release – IRI and Cannex Develop Breakthrough Solution to Simplify Annuity Modeling

IRI’s Baseline Values are updated quarterly and provided to help simplify the modeling of deferred annuity products within financial planning tools and processes for an initial, directional result.

IRI has also published a reference guide and brief document explaining the Baseline Values.