What DTCC Does for Insurance: The Complexity Behind the Policy

Insurance policies and annuity contracts often appear straightforward on the surface: an application is submitted, a policy value appears on an account statement, a beneficiary is updated, money is added to an annuity or a retirement withdrawal is received. What happens behind-the-scenes, however, is often less visible. Activities as routine as these can require coordination across multiple organizations. Each organization must receive the right information, in the right format, at the right time. Without a common system, every firm would need to create and maintain its own connection with every business partner. As the number of relationships grows, so does the complexity of exchanging information, processing requests and moving money across the industry. The result: a complicated web of connections, data formats and manual handoffs that can make insurance business slower, more expensive and harder to manage and sustain.

Enter Insurance & Retirement Solutions     

Building on DTCC’s success in mutual funds processing, Insurance & Retirement Solutions (I&RS) emerged as the industry's response to this growing challenge. In 1997, DTCC worked with Protective, Lincoln National, Edward Jones and Raymond James to help streamline annuity transaction processing. The goal was practical: establish a shared infrastructure that would allow carriers, distributors and technology providers to exchange information, process transactions and settle money more efficiently. With increasing annuity sales and transaction volumes, the industry's existing operating model struggled to keep pace. DTCC introduced a different model that enabled firms to connect once through a common network and conduct business using standardized processes, reducing the need to recreate the same connections across the marketplace and helping the industry manage greater volumes with less paper, repetitive data entry and reconciliation. Two years later, life insurance products were introduced into the same infrastructure originally developed to support annuities. 

What This Means for the End Investor

The population of Americans age 65 and older is projected to increase from approximately 13% today to nearly 25% by 2060, placing additional pressure on programs such as Social Security and Medicare. At the same time, rising healthcare costs, declining access to traditional pension plans, increasing age requirement to receive full social security benefits, and increasing life expectancy to 84.6 are heightening the need for guaranteed income solutions more than ever. U.S. retail annuity sales reached a record $464.1 billion in 2025, up 7% year over year, marking the ninth consecutive quarter of record sales. As more investors rely on insurance and annuity products to help meet their long-term financial needs, the infrastructure supporting those products becomes increasingly important. Through DTCC’s shared infrastructure, insurers, distributors and service providers can work together more effectively to meet that need.

Consider an investor applying for an annuity. The application, supporting documents and initial premium may move from a distributor to an insurance carrier. Insurance & Retirement Solutions supports information exchange, electronic documentation and same-day money settlement. Years later, that same investor may request an account value, update a beneficiary, transfer the account or make a withdrawal. Insurance & Retirement Solutions supports the policy information, record changes, financial instructions and settlement required to complete those activities. For the investor, the value is found in the experience rather than the technology itself. It is the confidence that the firms supporting their policy or retirement product can access the information needed to process requests, maintain records and complete transactions more efficiently.

From Application to Withdrawal

As alluded to earlier, Insurance & Retirement Solutions supports the operational work surrounding insurance and retirement products:

• Before a policy is issued: Producer authorization, applications, premiums, electronic documents and application status.
• While a policy is in force: Policy values, positions, financial activity, account information and record maintenance.
• When circumstances change: Advisor or broker-dealer changes, beneficiary and demographic updates, account transfers and death notifications.
• When money moves: Additional premiums, fund transfers, withdrawals, replacements and settlement.

As the industry’s needs evolved, Insurance & Retirement Solutions expanded beyond processing transactions by introducing Insurance Information Exchange (IIEX) and APIs. Policy, product, and producer data is centralized and available real-time. Together, these capabilities help firms make more informed decisions, improve the quality of information they rely on and better support the customers they serve.

Market Scale and Relevance

Today, DTCC supports nearly 600 insurance carrier and distributor clients, works with nearly 50 insurance technology and solution providers, and supports nearly 14,000 insurance and annuity product CUSIPs across annuities, life insurance, long-term care, disability and retirement products. In 2025, DTCC processed more than 19.4 billion insurance and annuity transactions and facilitated approximately $358.4 billion in settlement activity, an increase of nearly 37% since 2016. Averaged over the year, that is more than 53 million transactions and approximately $982 million in settlement activity each day. The figures represent the enormous amount of behind-the-scenes activity required to support the multiple transactions across the insurance marketplace. For policyholders and retirement savers, that means the firms supporting their products have the infrastructure needed to help keep records current, process requests efficiently and facilitate the movement of assets when needed. 

Nearly three decades later, the need for DTCC remains clear. Insurance and retirement products still depend on many organizations working together on behalf of the investor. DTCC’s shared foundation for that work, help firms operate more consistently and help the individuals they serve experience what matters most: current information, dependable processing and access to their assets when needed.