From the Rangers to Reinventing Annuity Applications

Paul Tyler (00:02) Hi, this is Paul Tyler and welcome to another episode of the LNA Hub. And today we have a great guest who has been on the forefront for a number of years of driving technology innovation for distributors and for carriers. None other than Andrew Barnett. Andrew, welcome.

Andrew Barnett (00:23) Paul, really appreciate it.

Paul Tyler (00:26) Yeah. Well, can you tell people what do you do at FIG? And I want to hear the backstory. Like we talked before, how do you go from the Texas Rangers to the insurance world? You've got to tell us your journey here.

Andrew Barnett (00:40) Yeah, no, absolutely. So where I'm at now, I'm the VP of Technology Innovation at FIG. So really heading up all the engineering efforts and kind of overseeing that entire vertical. But it is an interesting journey that got me here. I played baseball throughout my early years and had the privilege of playing at Gardner-Webb University in college and thankfully had the privilege of playing a season of minor league ball in the Rangers organization and realized that wasn't the life that I wanted — and also objectively didn't have the talent to make it to the big leagues anyways. No hundred mile an hour fastball coming out of this arm.

But how I ended up here from there — I actually met our Chief Technology Officer Aaron Price in college. So we went to college together. He started as a software engineer here and that's really where I made my entry, at a very pivotal time in our organization, and just have had the privilege of growing with the team since then and formally stepped into leadership about six and a half years ago.

Paul Tyler (01:48) Well, interesting. I'm sure you'll be at the IRI conference. I want to connect you to George Esposito, our CEO, because George actually followed a very similar path to yours. He almost went minor league baseball. He was a pitcher. Yeah, he did have a hundred mile an hour fastball. That's really interesting. You know, we've kind of had some interesting conversations over — I don't know — five, six, seven years. And you're always bringing some really interesting ideas to the table. And for listeners who don't follow you on LinkedIn, they've got to, because I think you're doing a great job talking about your journey, talking about what's going on in the industry. But talk to us a little bit about this Spireye hackathon that you were at — maybe even step back. Who is Spireye? What are they trying to do? Why were you there? And then tell us about this hackathon.

Andrew Barnett (02:49) Sure. So I've got to give IRI credit — two to three years of being a trade organization and really stepping into feeling like we've got all the right players at the table. We've got to make more of a push for being more digital first. And so that is one of the big initiatives. Digital first for annuities is a big thing within IRI. And something that distribution, carriers, and solution providers have all kind of banded around and come to the table with over the last few years.

And last February, so just over a year ago, was the first IRI hackathon. And really it was an impetus from our CTO and conversations with IRI on how do we address one of the biggest challenges — this disconnect between the business side that's involved in helping identify the biggest problems and this assumption at times that the implementation is a lot more daunting and more unrealistic than maybe it is.

And so the power of these hackathons where you bring — this year we had close to a hundred people present — you bring some of the brightest technical and business minds together for 48 hours and you just go and prove out some of these big, bold, audacious ideas. It really changes the perspective of what's possible. It kind of opens the mind up for this industry as a whole on — we're not talking about two-year roadmaps anymore. We've got to be thinking in terms of days and weeks, or even months on the long end. We can't be planning out to 2028 at this point.

Paul Tyler (04:30) No, absolutely not. I think the pace has just increased. I think long-term this will be a benefit for the business. Let's talk about forms. I mean, forms are like the backbone of this industry. I think three jobs back at a carrier, I built an iPad app to take new business applications. Man, there was so much emotion inside the carrier about these forms and name fields. Okay. So tell us — you said at this hackathon, let's build an application. Talk to us about what your project was.

Andrew Barnett (05:22) Yeah, it's something that I've been very bullish on and passionate about, especially in recent years. We've had some great companies come to the table and help turn what was a primarily paper process into a digital form — an actual literal form in a lot of cases. And that has been a huge need that has been solved within our industry, or mostly solved. You're seeing far higher EAP adoption rates. But when we look at AI, it's not just theoretical anymore, right? It's in the palm of our hands. Organizations across the country and the world are really looking at how to leverage it more.

I just have a hard time sitting back and thinking that the way advisors and their clients are purchasing the products that we distribute is going to look even remotely similar in a year or two to how it does today. And so what we set out to achieve was — all right, what if we had a world where maybe it wasn't so form dependent? And what if we had a level of flexibility around how data is retrieved, how it's applied to the application, how it's transmitted to the insurance company?

There's been a lot of great work done at the carriers on carrier-to-carrier paperless replacement. So the movement of money is happening faster than ever. They're building in suitability checks, so hopefully by the time the app actually gets in the door it's in good order and we're just waiting on the funds to move. But that upfront piece is still painstaking. And we hear it all the time from our advisors. We feel it.

And so we really looked at — what if this experience could be embedded natively in any application, whether it's a distributor's portal, a carrier's portal, a third-party solution provider? Are we that far off to think that an annuity couldn't be purchased within Schwab one day? And then looking at this human-AI harmony that we're trying to figure out — is information going to be gathered human to human forever? Is every piece of information going to be gathered that way?

So one thing that we built was, yes, a chat interface if that was preferred — but the more impressive piece was an AI agent that could actually work on behalf of the advisor, call the client, with full context of what information is missing after it's looked in the CRM, after it's looked in standard operating procedures, after it's looked in any other resource that the advisor may have — meeting notes, you name it — filling in those gaps. And then an advisor can spend their time in more valuable places. So that's what we set out to prove, and we had a working prototype within roughly 48 hours.

Paul Tyler (08:35) That's crazy. So agentic. So it was a chat-based application. Is that right?

Andrew Barnett (08:42) Yeah, that was a component of it. What our team really set out on was — we know we need to gather information and we know we need to transmit information. But the way the data comes in and the way the data goes out can and should have a tremendous amount of flexibility to it. And so that's what created three or four different mediums for that intake. One of them was an actual AI agent calling and having a voice conversation with the client.

Paul Tyler (09:09) And try to imagine doing that two years ago. I think for people who listen and say, okay, come on, it's just a form — these forms are complex. If this person is a person, here's the form track. If this person is a corporation, click this. If this person is this age, fall out to this form. It's not just building a form that was hard. And then to be able to get the data to talk back was a whole other story. I think the AI has really flattened the application itself. If you have the rules.

Andrew Barnett (10:03) That was one of the things that was interesting because, for example, the first hackathon — which FIG participated in last February — was just before Anthropic released Claude Code. Then you step in and look, we built a lot of stuff as an eight or nine-person team with the tools that we had at the time, but the speed this year was on a whole other level. And I think that's so important for our industry to realize — the time to implementation is not becoming the bottleneck anymore. The bottleneck is on the other two ends: do we have a good enough idea of what problem to solve and how to solve it? Can we get all the context laid out well? And then on the other end — the code's written, but how do we get it out the door? How do we make sure it's tested? How do we actually release the thing?

Paul Tyler (10:57) Right. Well, you know, I'd put a fourth one in there — which is a challenge that's been there forever but you don't really think about. When I was designing forms, okay, assume you got the rules. What does the form look like? Well, now it's — the form is not such a problem, but what's the process collectively for all these carriers presenting their rules in some format that you can ingest and that's kept up to date? I think this is going back to your comment about IRI. You've got to pull everybody together. That is one of the advantages Zinnia has — we've got a lot of people on AnnuityNet and LifeSpeed where you've got a bunch of carriers all kind of rolling in one direction. Accord did a great job setting standards, but then you've got all these deviations and you've got to understand that.

Andrew Barnett (11:42) And that's such an important point. Standards don't become standards overnight. That process can happen very quickly. And that was one of the core things of this hackathon — not just getting the technical folks together, but also thinking from that standards mindset and understanding that the path to creating standards is not as complex as we've always made it. And also, if a standard doesn't exist, we don't necessarily need to get 50 different people together in a room to create one. We can be flexible enough to evolve a standard over time if you've got some first movers that can really lead the charge.

Paul Tyler (12:27) Well, the other part — when you think of standards — this is a little geeky on my side — is the standards. Everybody's got their own naming convention: first underscore last, or name, or camelCase. The AI can solve that. It's just, did you actually give us access to these data elements — call them whatever you want. So I think the barrier to doing that, at your point, is much, much lower.

Let me just double click on Claude. I've got a personal interest there. Are you using Claude with the developers at FIG?

Andrew Barnett (13:07) Absolutely. It has become heavily ingrained in how we develop and we're actively looking at ways to leverage it more and standardize certain aspects to really tap into some of those speed enhancements that are available.

Paul Tyler (13:25) Yeah. Just to give you a little context — I was on Claude Code week one. I mean, I can't tell you what it's done for us on websites and prototypes. It's been kind of incredible. I would not say we've got it all figured out. It's one thing for one person to use it. It's another thing to put it into a team of engineers. I think we must have like a thousand engineers across the country. Right. It feels like there's a lot of change management even on the development side. Like if I were to work with a team of DevOps now and use this collectively, we'd really have to rethink how we're using sub-agents — and even that stuff is changing rapidly. Tell me a little bit about the cultural change and how you've had to work with your teams to make the most out of it. Where are you in that journey?

Andrew Barnett (14:28) Yeah, so it's certainly been a journey. But one of the things that we've always prioritized in hiring our engineers is the humility and the hunger to learn and be creative. And so we've got a group of folks that want to know how to leverage these tools. Certainly change is always difficult — doesn't matter who you are, the change feels uncomfortable for a time. But I've got to give our team a tremendous amount of credit.

I think the other piece that's important is building a culture around the use of these tools and the curiosity of them. So ensuring that amongst the team, you're sharing those wins, but you're also sharing some of the times where AI didn't seem to do what you wanted it to do.

Now, the challenge in that — especially with the more recent models that have come out just in the last couple of months — we've got to be persistent in evaluating AI for those use cases. Just because the use case didn't work six months ago doesn't mean we can write it off forever. And so that's part of the challenge too. I've seen someone say basically, anytime you work with AI and it doesn't give you what you want, go ahead and document that somewhere and then come check it again in a month or two.

Having the community around that — where the light bulb moments start going off — that's been one of the biggest unlocks for our team. You have someone that just uncovers something, it gets shared, and then immediately people start firing off, "oh my goodness, I didn't even think about using it that way — and we could do this and that." That's where you start to see it catch fire.

Paul Tyler (16:14) Yeah. I've used it for research, doing sophisticated machine learning type analysis of data we have. It's unlocked stuff where I would have hired people, staffed this up, asked for budgets. Let me ask you — I could geek out for a good while on this. From a business standpoint, agents — I find there are groups that like tech and groups that don't, but one thing in common is they're reluctant to change. If something's going well over here, I just don't have time to deal with another screen. It's got to have a short-term payoff.

If we don't talk about Claude Code or agentic AI — how is this going to change the experience for distributors? I don't want you to give away any secrets, but fast forward three years — what's an advisor going to expect from a distributor or marketing organization?

Andrew Barnett (17:33) It's something we're putting a lot of thought towards. I think our industry has always lagged behind from an advisor experience perspective — comparatively speaking to other areas of financial services, but also just general consumer behavior. And we've still survived. But I think what we've got to realize is that those expectations, that gap is widening by the day.

Catherine Dease, who's the Chief Technology and Innovation Officer at IRI and really spearheaded the hackathon this year — she and I were on a panel last week, and she talked about this exponential expectation gap that's forming. And it is just that. It's getting wider.

So one of the things I think that's most important is we've got to provide the same experiences that these consumers and advisors are finding in other areas. They can go and purchase something on Amazon and get insurance right there with it. It is one transaction, natively embedded where they are. So you've also got to even think about what the future looks like as AI becomes more prominent for consumers when thinking about financial advice. Right, wrong, or indifferent, it is a tool. And so how do we start to think about positioning the execution of those tools and the contact with a qualified advisor right there more natively as they're having these interactions?

I think one of the unique things about being an IMO in the distribution space is we create a lot of value in some of the proprietary technology and experiences that we build, but also in being that glue layer where advisors don't have to worry about six, eight, twelve different tools on top of their primary tech stack. In the wealth management space you've got this other suite of tools that we've got to reduce that friction on — reduce the swivel chair as much as we can. And that's certainly what we're going to continue to set our sights on.

Paul Tyler (19:52) Yeah, super interesting. How about for carriers? As FIG goes through your list of carriers — your top ten or fifteen, your primary ones — what's going to be the checklist? What's going to be new on the checklist next year?

Andrew Barnett (20:14) Yeah, I'm very much of the opinion that yes, there is a level of differentiation in the products themselves to a point, but they are on the verge of commoditizing in some respects. I think they are, and I think what you're starting to see is the separation between those carriers that have an equally valuable technology and service offering alongside the products themselves.

Yes, the financial backing of the insurance company is extremely important and it's not going to go away. That's the chassis and the foundation of what makes these products attractive. But when we think about the expectations of the advisor — if these products are converging on the value they provide — it becomes how easy is it to purchase the products, how easy is it to service the products, how easy is it to replace the products if and when that time comes, and what's the quality of the technology experience. Speed to issuance is another key.

And I think what we're seeing is those carriers that are focusing on really leveraging technology and AI effectively, that are focused on empowering distribution to be creative and not beholden to the older way of thinking and approaching problems, and those that are really putting a focus on being a little bit more open with their data, their information, and integration capabilities — those are the ones that are rising to the top. And I think you're going to see them continue to do that.

Paul Tyler (21:47) Okay, so Andrew — I've got this great customer portal. I've got an agent portal. Is that good enough?

Andrew Barnett (21:53) It's not. And the main reason for that is independence is in our name. FIG is independently held, we're fully committed to that. But also in our representation of the insurance companies that we have relationships with, we are independent. And by extension, our advisors are independent.

And so very rarely do you find an advisor or an agent that's writing a single carrier or just two carriers. Many times it's five, ten, twelve. But that list is converging because of experience, not just because of the products and the competitiveness of the products. And so advisors don't want to have to go to ten or twelve different carrier portals to do their business. They want to leverage a platform like ours where I go to one place, it doesn't matter where the data is coming from, it doesn't matter who the carrier is, I know that I follow one workflow for each main component and everything else is abstracted away from me. That's ultimately the goal.

Paul Tyler (23:01) Yeah. And we're making a big bet that post-issue servicing is going to be the next evolution in digital services. First step is APIs. Maybe MCPs are hot, then they're not — I don't know where it's going to head. What do you think? I'd be happy with APIs.

Andrew Barnett (23:26) Yeah, we've been fighting that fight for a long time. And I think one thing I stress in conversations with carriers and solution providers alike is — I don't really care about the method of transmission. What I care about is the data itself and my ability to retrieve it when I need to. For some data that is real time, I need it real time. I don't need a carbon copy of it that refreshes overnight — that produces little value to me. But then there's other data that, hey, if you're reassessing account values on an annuity on a nightly basis, I don't need to pull that eighteen times throughout the day.

And so you also see organizations like Snowflake with their enterprise data share capabilities, which I think opens up a lot of other possibilities for data being exchanged. You don't need the API layer so much at that point — it's already modeled and you can retrieve it in a more flexible way.

Paul Tyler (24:39) We just announced a partnership with Snowflake for that very same reason — to reduce the friction between sharing data between our distributors on our platform and the carriers we have. I completely agree. Well, last question — what excites you? What will you do in the next year that you think will rock the world?

Andrew Barnett (25:12) Yeah, we've got several things up our sleeve, some of which will be coming soon. But I think on a more technical side — and I'll take two angles, one industry-wise and one more tactical and technical.

On the technical side, the speed of execution is faster than it has ever been. And so I'm really excited to see the pace of enhancements — large enhancements, not just small incremental ones. We're going to look back on 2026 and see a body of work and say, wow, I cannot believe we were able to get all that done. Leaning heavily into AI and technology to keep a part of that — that's what I'm really excited about. Really chipping away at some of these big business goals that we have.

But on the industry side, seeing some really encouraging mindset shifts and investments — monetary, time, both — from insurance carriers on the technology side. And so we're at a point where bespoke integrations have less overhead than they ever have before. And if that can bring an experience that is exponentially better than some of the other options out there, I think you're going to see some of those pop up over the next, call it nine months or so.

Paul Tyler (26:32) Excellent. All right. Well, Andrew, if people want to reach out to you, what's the best way to find you? LinkedIn?

Andrew Barnett (26:39) Yeah, LinkedIn is definitely going to be the best route and I'd love to connect with those throughout the industry.

Paul Tyler (26:47) All right. Hey, listen, thanks for the time. This was great and we'll see you in, I guess, a month or so.

Andrew Barnett (26:52) Sounds good, looking forward to it. Thanks, Paul.

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