With refresh, Morningstar is all the more dominant in the variable annuity research sector

Morningstar has completed a combo package it is calling Morningstar Annuity Intelligence; a refresh and integration of its Annuity Intelligence and Annuity Analyzer products.
The web-based set of applications for researching variable annuities has been designed with pretty much all the financial professionals in mind that interface with annuities.
That includes advisers, broker-dealers, compliance officers, as well as insurance carrier representatives that need to compare their own products with those of others.
The systems databases can churn out real-time information on almost 2,000 annuity contracts as well as more than 100,000 annuity subaccounts.
I remain floored by the idea that much of what constitutes the data in the Intelligence tool is culled from manual research of annuity prospectuses that become available en masse from providers on or around 1 May each year.
My colleague Darla Mercado and I met with Morningstar’s Kevin Loffredi last week. He is vice president of the company’s annuity solutions group, which falls within the software division (at times it feels like a lot of my energy and attention gets focused on keeping track of all the layers of all the onions in this industry, but I digress).
We received a demo of the new Annuity Intelligence interface and its more intuitive navigation.
There are also more choices in the way of search capabilities too; it really does appear to meld the lion’s share of functions available in the two previously separate tools.
For example it is even simpler than before to compare multiple VA contracts side-by-side, and then print out FINRA-reviewed reports on them.
Mr. Loffredi said it is too difficult to come up with a ballpark or base price because the arrangements Morningstar has with different types of customers/providers simply varies too much (I do not buy this but I am more apt to put up with it from Morningstar because they do share pricing with us on some of their adviser-facing products).
For those (like me) that need a brief refresher on the historic landscape/origins here; Annuity Intelligence came from Morningstar’s acquisition of the Annuity Intelligence Report tool from Advanced Sales and Marketing Corp. in 2010. The report tool itself had been launched in 2007 (Advanced Sales and Marketing Corp. launched in 2001).

Morningstar put out a prepared statement this morning and it makes sense to just run the latter three paragraphs pretty much the way they are for the sake of details in them:

Morningstar Annuity Intelligence includes a new lifetime income calculator, which allows an adviser to see the amount of guaranteed income an annuity benefit will provide for a client based on different criteria. The solution includes plain English descriptions of complex provisions in annuity riders, annuity fee data, contract titling information, and historical contract data dating back to the 1960s. In addition, it helps compliance officers support their suitability and review process for an annuity purchase, and it enables suitability forms to be automatically populated with contract, benefit, and fee information to streamline the transaction process.
As part of the new Annuity Intelligence solution, Morningstar offers two add-on capabilities, VA Expense Analyzer and VA Hypothetical Illustrator, which are designed to help provide transparency to advisers and their investor clients. VA Expense Analyzer helps streamline the compliance and sales disclosure process by conducting suitability and cost analyses to help make sure a recommended annuity is appropriate for a client. It also calculates how long it would take for a client to recover a surrender charge in the event he or she exchanges an annuity contract. VA Hypothetical Illustrator helps support client proposals by analyzing variable annuity performance as a stand-alone investment, in comparison with competing products or benchmarks, or within the context of a complete portfolio.
Current Morningstar Annuity Analyzer and Annuity Intelligence Report clients will be migrated to the new Morningstar Annuity Intelligence solution over the next 12 to18 months…Morningstar Annuity Intelligence subscribers who also use Morningstar Advisor Workstation will be able to link to the new solution directly through Advisor Workstation later this year.

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