After the NAVA Conference back in February, we wrote a post for the Wall Street Technology blog on the online advisor education resources offered by Annuity Monitor firms. Interest was high at the conference, and we reported on the mixed results we saw among annuity firms. Outside of standouts like ING and Pacific Life, with extensive content including CE courses online, the industry as a whole had surprisingly little to offer advisors to help deal with certification, compliance and sales and investment strategies.

Now, with an updated advisor education report for Mutual Fund Monitor - Advisor, we can shed some light on how annuity and mutual fund firms compare. Annuities can be a more complicated and more heavily regulated product, so at the same time we would expect that advisors would require more educational resources while firms face more red tape in providing them. NAVA attendees would be reassured to know that annuity firms apparently aren’t that far behind.

Without ruining the suspense of our latest MFM-A report, we can say that results are similarly top-heavy. We gave high but qualified reviews to iShares, Oppenheimer and Fidelity, who, incidentally, doesn’t extend its valuable resources to the annuity space. Annuities’ top firms definitely compare favorably to these mutual fund leaders. A number of mutual fund firms fell flat, with only superficial coverage or neglect of key topics, or simply no resources to speak of.

On the whole, continuing education was a particular weak point for mutual fund advisor education. Less than half of the firms covered in the report offer any information on CE programs, with some doing little more than referring advisors to telephone services for more information. Only iShares offered CE courses to be taken for credit online. Navigation was also a common drawback, even among the highest-scoring firms - valuable educational content was inconvenient to access, poorly labeled or mixed with client-ready sales materials. The best annuity firms actually tend to do much better at consolidating resources into an advisor education center.

That said, mutual fund advisors have access to much more up-to-date market news and commentary. Annuity firms could take a page from the related mutual fund industry and make sure to keep advisors informed and engaged with those kinds of updates, in addition to their understandably heavier emphasis on compliance and regulations. But on the whole, our research shows that annuity firms should be careful what firms they emulate when making, in many cases, much needed improvements to their advisor education resources.