To Our Customers and Friends:
Adam Bryan, General Manager, DTCC Insurance and Retirement Services
Welcome to IQ, the “Insurance Quarterly,” providing our customers with an overview of the latest news and information from DTCC Insurance & Retirement Services. The new look, name and format for our publication (and our business), and the appointment of a new general manager to lead the business, occurs at a time when DTCC and the industry are entering a new phase of our collaborative efforts to move insurance processing into a fully electronic environment.
As the new general manager, I am very excited about joining DTCC Insurance & Retirement Services at this time of great change. Our new name reflects the change in who we are, what we do and where we are going. And our new strategic plan provides a clear view of how we are going to get there.
Developed by DTCC in close collaboration with the senior representatives of the carrier, broker/dealer and clearing firms on our Senior Advisory Board, the strategic blueprint endorses DTCC’s evolving partnership/leadership role in planning and implementing standardized automation for insurance processing – a role that DTCC has assumed successfully in other financial sectors.
The plan calls for DTCC to focus on two key areas: 1) advocate and implement the industry’s straight-through-processing goals for annuities as defined in the NAVA STP initiative; 2) expand automation across distribution channels (a necessary component of creating STP for the entire product life cycle).
The lessons learned from automation in other sectors teach us that the implementation of STP is not an instant transformation; it is a journey that requires long-term strategy. With insurance, we are in the earlier stages of the journey. Paper is the biggest obstacle in the path of STP, and we at DTCC understand that it is up to all of us to overcome the inertia of the familiar manual process. Leveraging our safety and soundness, at-cost business model, processing and storage capacity and ability to deliver, we are committed to executing against this ambitious action plan and accelerating the momentum toward automation.
DTCC Insurance and Retirement Services
A new name reflects an expanding role for our business. What began as Annuity Processing Services a decade ago with a couple of money settlement and information sharing services has expanded to 10 products (and more on the way) covering agent services, pre-sale services, in force transactions and monitoring and reporting services. And now with more focus on the retirement income area, Insurance & Retirement Services is growing into its new name.
The future holds more change, and DTCC Insurance & Retirement Services, by our new name or any other, will strive to connect our customers in an electronic environment for insurance processing supported by the highest level of customer service and the lowest costs.
The June 2008 SAB meeting confirmed DTCC development plans over the next 12 –18 months and endorsed longer-term strategic goals, some of which are highlighted in this issue of IQ.
The road ahead is crowded with activity: new services already in the pipeline (Attachments and Replacements), enhancements to our existing services and other possible new initiatives. Beyond the immediate development horizon, we are considering other services in the pre- and post-transaction areas as well as seeing the emergence of support for a central information “warehouse” for the industry.
We are ready for these and other challenges that you, our customers, are voicing. And we are vigorously working to bring each solution to market and to help the industry meet the competitive challenges of managing risk, reducing cost and growing new business.
So please read about our plans and products in this issue of IQ. If you have questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact me at abryan@dtcc.com.
Adam Bryan
General Manager