Katherine Dease - Why should an Annuity Be Harder Than a Mutual Fund?

Katherine Dease has one mandate at the Insured Retirement Institute: modernize the annuity industry. She has spent her career on the vendor side of that problem, with product leadership roles at Ebix, now Zinnia, and Insurance Technologies. That experience is exactly why she stopped trying to solve it platform by platform. Her thesis: as long as every provider speaks its own dialect, integration stays expensive and annuities keep failing to show up in the tools advisors actually use. The proof point is paperless replacements. Athene, Jackson, Sammons, and Prudential went first, taking on the risk of going first with the DTCC and IRI, and took carrier-to-carrier replacement business from an average of 18 days to 24 hours, a 94% reduction in cycle time. Twelve carriers plus the DTCC are now live, more than 50,000 transactions have settled, and Katherine expects close to 30 carriers by year end. Advisors are calling their carriers to ask what just happened. She also unpacks the can-sell and training standards that cut NIGOs 40% at one carrier, what’s next in the book-of-business API work, and how a 48-hour hackathon put four solutions into production. If you want the playbook for changing an industry without waiting for consensus, this is it.