NAIC Creates a Retirement Security Working Group

Members of the Life Insurance and Annuities Committee — an arm of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC) — have agreed to set up a new working group that will focus on retirement security.

The committee named Stephen Taylor, the insurance commissioner for the District of Columbia, to serve as the working group’s first chairman.

(Related: Life, Retirement Industry Officials Wary of ‘Patchwork’ Annuity Sales Standards)

The committee members agreed unanimously to create the working group Sunday in New York, at a session at the NAIC’s summer national meeting.

Taylor has been the NAIC’s insurance commissioner since 2015. He has a bachelor’s degree from Fordham University and a law degree from Georgetown University.

He is already chair of the NAIC’s Consumer Liaison Committee and its Consumer Participation Board of Trustees. He is vice chair of the NAIC’s Life Insurance and Annuities Committee.

The Insured Retirement Institute has been asking the Life Insurance and Annuities Committee to create the working group.

Jason Berkowitz, the chief legal and regulatory affairs officer at IRI, delivered a presentation on the weak the state of U.S. residents’ finances before the Life Insurance and Annuities Committee took up the motion to create the new working group.

The committee also agreed unanimously to create a new Accelerated Underwriting Working Group.

The working group will consider the use of external data and data analysis techniques in accelerated life insurance underwriting processes.

The working group will also consider the work of the NAIC’s Life Actuarial Task Force on the accelerated underwriting topic and may, “if appropriate, draft guidance for states,” according to the NAIC’s official committee session summary.

— Read State Regulators Push Annuity Sales Standards Project One Step Forward, on ThinkAdvisor.

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