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Andrew Mais. Credit: Connecticut Insurance Department

Life Health > Annuities

Andrew Mais to Lead State Insurance Regulators Into Fiduciary Rule Arena

By Allison Bell

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Members of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners have elected Andrew Mais to be the group’s president in 2024.

The results mean that Mais, the Connecticut insurance commissioner, will lead the NAIC as the organization wrestles with the Department of Labor over jurisdiction over annuity sales standards.

Jon Godfread, North Dakota’s insurance commissioner, will be the NAIC’s 2024 president-elect.

Godfread is 6 feet 11 inches tall. In 2019, Guinness World Records listed him as the world’s tallest known elected official.

What it means: Mais and Godfread will be two of the players who shape the rules that determine what kind of advice to give retirement savers, how to document the advice and what kind of legal liability is faced for those recommendations.

The NAIC: U.S. federal law leaves regulation of the business of insurance to the states. The NAIC is a Kansas City, Missouri-based group that helps the top regulators in the states and similar jurisdictions, such as the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, do their jobs.

It does not directly set laws or regulations, but states often start with NAIC models when drafting their laws and regulations. In some cases, they arrange for certain types of updates to existing documents, such as accounting forms, to take effect automatically.

NAIC officers: Chlora Lindley-Myers, Missouri’s insurance director, is the current NAIC president.

In addition to Mais and Godread, the other 2024 officers will be Scott White, the vice president, and Beth Kelleher Dwyer, the secretary-treasurer.

White is commissioner of the Virginia Bureau of Insurance, while Kelleher Dwyer is the Rhode Island insurance superintendent.

NAIC members elected officers Monday, during a session in Orlando, Florida, at the group’s fall national meeting.

Lindley-Myers noted Friday, in opening remarks at a meeting general session, that the meeting attracted 1,782 in-person attendees and about 1,200 online attendees, and that in-person attendance was the highest since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, in early 2020.

She recalled that she became the NAIC’s secretary-treasurer in early 2020, according to a summary provided by the NAIC.

The “future looked bright on a calendar that read … January 2020,” Lindley-Myers said. “If that was a movie, you’d hear ‘dun, dun, dun!’”

The sales standards: The Labor Department has moved to define anyone who regularly advises people rolling money out of 401(k) plans or other retirement accounts into other financial arrangements as fiduciaries, meaning that they would have to put clients’ interests first, offer detailed compensation disclosures, provide detailed justifications for any product recommendations and, possibly, face future legal attacks from clients who are unhappy about investment results.

The NAIC wants financial professionals who sell annuities to retirement savers to abide by its own recently adopted annuity suitability update.

The underlying suitability model requires financial professionals to verify that the annuities offered to clients suit their needs.

The update is designed to wrap around the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Regulation Best Interest. Annuity advisors who come under the standard must show that they have acted in clients’ best interest.

Groups that have supported adoption of fiduciary standard regulations, such as the Certified Financial Planner Board of Standards, have generally expressed skepticism about the NAIC’s approach.

Many insurers and groups representing life insurance companies and life insurance agents have supported the NAIC’s approach.

Incoming president: Connecticut, the state in which Mais is the top insurance regulator, has supported the NAIC approach. In 2021, it became the 16th jurisdiction to adopt the NAIC suitability model update.

Mais, who came into insurance regulation through work as a communicator, has a bachelor’s degree in organizational behavior from Yale.

He served for six years as the host of a weekly political talk show in Connecticut, then worked for five years as director of public affairs and research at New York state’s insurance department.

He then was part of the insurance regulation-tracking team at Deloitte before receiving an appointment to be Connecticut’s insurance commissioner in 2019.

Andrew Mais. Credit: Connecticut Insurance Department

Allison Bell

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