How IRI is helping reduce the anxiety around retirement

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Beyond the Challenge is a podcast where executives in the insurance and financial services industry share their insights and experiences. Hosts Kevin and Sandy Dougherty talk with today’s top business leaders about what keeps them up at night and the biggest opportunity organizations can capitalize on today. We encourage you to listen, share, and subscribe to our program.

Kevin and Sandy Dougherty each have over 20 years of experience in insurance and financial services, corporate leadership, and executive search. They’re the owners of Global Corporate Solutions and Global Corporate Leaders. Global Corporate Solutions partners with organizations to gain efficiencies and contain costs. Global Corporate Leaders partners with organizations to enhance and evaluate talent.

Beyond the Challenge podcast is sponsored by Exactuals, perfecting payments and the data driving them; Techficient, transforming the protection journey with intelligent data and machine learning to drive better outcomes; and JourneyGuide, improving your clients’ retirement outcomes through interactive planning software.

Welcome to Beyond the Challenge. Here are your hosts, Kevin and Sandy.

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Kevin: Today, we’re talking with Wayne Chopus, President and CEO of the Insured Retirement Institute about the trends, challenges, and opportunities he sees for the retirement and insurance industry. The IRI is the leading trade association for the insured retirement industry. Wayne, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got into the retirement and insurance industry?

Wayne: Yeah, absolutely, and I appreciate you inviting me to your podcast today. Very excited to have this opportunity. If I go back in time, almost 30 years, I would say, it was a little bit of skill and a lot of luck. I came out of college with a degree in finance. I knew I wanted to work in financial services. There was a major insurance company at that time, primarily a P&C company called The Hartford right down the road from where I lived in Connecticut just branching out into the annuity space. I probably had one chapter in my four years in college on annuities but I was really intrigued about joining something new, something growth oriented. Applied, got the job, spent almost 20 years there. At one point, we ended up number one in the industry for many years in terms of total annuity sales and presence and I moved over to a larger insurance company, Prudential Financial, for about 10 years as well. Can’t say enough great things about both of those companies, the opportunities that they provided me personally and professionally, but at Prudential, I was a board member of IRI and there was a public search for a new CEO after my predecessor announced their retirement. I’ve had a longstanding passion for the industry and I was at a point in my career where I wanted to make more of a difference, have more of an impact, and, as I mentioned, it’s a bit personal to me, retirement in general, my grandparents, I told this story at our annual conference a couple of months ago, my grandparents were great people. My grandmothers lived to 97 and 98. They had great lives, they had great lasting legacies on their family, but they did not live what I would call a secure and dignified retirement and I wanted to take a career path that gave me the opportunity on a grassroots level, at a legislative level, at a regulatory level to make an impact and work really day in and day out on helping all America’s workers and retirees achieve that opportunity for the secure and dignified retirement. So I was fortunate enough at that point, about three years ago, to be selected to this role at IRI and that’s where I get to focus my energy day in and day out.

Sandy: Thanks, Wayne. How is the IRI helping Americans reduce their anxiety about retirement?

Wayne: There are many, many ways. For purposes of time, I think I’ll highlight one in particular here, and as a reminder, your audience, really, our mission is to champion retirement security for all Americans. So, we do that in a lot of different ways. We have an award-winning advocacy team that’s advancing a very comprehensive piece of legislation right now. It’s the second comprehensive retirement security measure that we’ve seen in the last three years. If I go back in time to 2019, Secure 1.0 passed through I think it was in December of 2019. It was the largest piece of retirement legislation passed in over a decade. We worked really hard on a lot of provisions that sat within that bill to expand access to workplace retirement plans, to lower barriers, to offering lifetime incomes in plans, to increase the RMD age, required minimum distribution age, to 72 to allow more workers and retirees to save as retirement has changed. There was a lot of incentives on small business offering plans and, as I said, at the time, most significant piece of legislation over a decade, but we did not rest on our laurels there. We’ve been working really well since then I’m Secure 2.0, which is this year’s bill that has some enhancements on auto enrollment provisions, helping out workers with student loans, catch up contributions increasing, moving the RMD age up to 75 now, and a lot of what we do now here day in and day out from an advocacy standpoint is focused on that. It’s through the House, it’s focused on getting it through the Senate. We’re working really hard on the Hill to move this through and we’re very optimistic that Secure 2.0 and all of these great improvements for retirement security will be passed and signed by President Biden by year end.

Kevin: Do you see annuities playing a larger or smaller part in the retirement space over the next three to five years?

Wayne: The answer is clearly larger. Every one of us at team IRI works day in and day out to ensure that the awareness of the value of the annuity and what annuity can do for retirement security protection grows day in and day out. And we continue to see surveys and I’m sure you’ve seen along the way that continue to show the need for these types of protection products has never been greater. There are significant amounts of interest in the benefits that annuities deliver. The Alliance for Lifetime Income, for example, just coined the term “Peak 65,” which means in 2024, there’ll be more people aged 65 than ever, and all those folks are looking or will need some form of protected lifetime income as they fight the recent market volatility, the interest rate instability with that, and just the decline of your traditional pension plans as you move forward. So I think the bottom line is the industry is prepared with the products that meet the needs of our workers and retirees and there’s a lot of significant product innovation that’s come out from Secure 1.0 and I think if 2.0, if and when that passes, will respond accordingly as well to ensure the access that America’s workers and retirees have in these products continues to grow as part of a retirement solution.

Sandy: Great. So what do you see as the next big thing coming to the retirement marketplace?

Wayne: That’s a good question. I’m not sure I can provide one big thing. I know one thing I can do is look in the rearview mirror and say that I’ve watched 30 years of product innovation through our industry regardless of the environment that we were in and I have no reason to believe that’s going to change and I think if you just look at recent product innovation, which, again, is constantly evolving to meet the needs of consumers, to meet the needs of our advisors and the markets as they play, traditionally, many of the variable annuity products and retirement products that were sold 10, 15, 20 years ago were tied to lifetime income, but I think as we watch consumer needs change, as we’ve watched folks want to be protected against market volatility, and as we’ve seen recently, markets can go down, it’s been awhile but they can go down, as we’ve looked at combating rising inflation, as we’ve looked at these historically low interest rates, we’ve never had a larger diversity of product offerings in our space than we do today. And, again, I’m not sure I can tell you exactly what the next big thing will be but we have people at every one of our member companies working every single day on looking forward to the needs of consumers today but also the needs of consumers in three to five years and they’ve always met that need through product innovation and that’s going to hold true. It actually turned into extraordinary sales in 2021, the highest total of annuity sales in 2021 since 2008, and I think that reflects multiple things. This was during and coming out of pandemic as consumers’ confidence in our products is at an all-time high and the ability for our industry to continue to innovate and meet consumer needs in this environment seems at an all-time high.

Kevin: What do you see as the biggest opportunity for the retirement industry over the next three to five years?

Wayne: I’ll call it digital solutions, I’ll call it digital advancement. It’s a very unique strategic initiative of IRI. It’s well known in industry that our industry is well behind the technological curve, so to speak, that many of our consumers and advisors expect, again, going back to 2019, my first year in the role, we created a board working group on advancing digital solutions in the tech world within the IRI community and we had to turn board members away from joining that group because I think our board member executives understand that we’ve got to transform, this is such a competitive issue for us as we move forward, we’ve got to conduct business in a manner that our consumers expect. We’re well positioned to lead this effort. I think what makes us very unique here at IRI is we do represent the full supply chain of the insured retirement industry so the insurance companies, the broker dealers, the asset managers, the service providers, and we’re all working together to drive the adoption of digital practices that will continue to advance the ease of doing business and the access for more consumers to have for our products. We established four guiding principles around this work on digital solutions back in 2020 and we’re working really closely together right now to adopt a lot of those digital practices and it’s clear one lagging segment would slow the entire process but I think our entire industry as a whole understands that this is a transformational initiative, that IRI will continue to advance, but, again, I think it shows where we are as an industry that we now realize that we have the products, we have the innovation on the product side, we have the solutions to meet an array of consumer needs in retirement but we’ve got to really transform the way in which that business is done and we’re working very hard on that right now.

Sandy: What’s the best decision you made that had a positive impact on your career?

Wayne: Not sure exactly where in my career path I made this decision but it was when I started to realize that, sometimes, your career can be a lattice and not just a ladder, right? So I started, as I mentioned, about 30 years ago at a very entry-level position, driven by desire at the time to work hard and be promoted and move to the next role on the org chart, so to speak, looking for the next title or salary increase, and I think that’s very traditional thinking in the corporate world and very prevalent back then and even so much today. But I think, over time, I started to realize that that mentality at times was potentially detrimental to my growth and development so I tell people all the time now to ensure that they aren’t overlooking opportunities that they may perceive as lateral, because in many cases, those lateral opportunities and moves are just as critical to your personal and professional growth and development as landing the career job can be. So I found, over time, that when I changed my mindset a little bit on that and realized that there’s so much to be learned in other types of similar roles, it really helped me grow professionally and personally but also potentially opened up doors that a more traditional path or more traditional thinking would not.

Kevin: What advice would you give to someone looking to get into the financial services or insurance industry?

Wayne: I feel very passionate about this one and this answer. I think you have to state why you’re choosing to move into financial services or the insurance and I think you have to have a passion for what you’re going to do day in and day out. Because, inherently, you’ve got to be somebody that wants to help others and financial services is an industry completely dedicated to people helping people and as you’ve heard me say a couple times already today, in my case, it’s helping all Americans achieve a secure and dignified retirement. I’m very fortunate that I work with an employee base and a board of directors that cares so much about helping others and protecting others but I would advise anyone looking to get into the industry to make sure that they have a very clear personal value statement or a clear personal mission statement on what financial services means to them and why they would want to move into a space like that, because it’s an extremely rewarding industry to be in from a standpoint of, again, a community of people helping people and, in our case, achieve a secure and dignified retirement, but I think you’ve got to make sure you’ve got that clear value statement or personal mission statement for yourself on why you would want to be in financial services.

Sandy: Wayne, thank you for your time today. It’s been great to hear your insights and how you see the retirement marketplace changing over the next few years and to hear your passion about the industry itself.

Wayne: It was my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

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