About

Annuity Digest has been an independent reference for the annuity market since 2009. It was built on a simple premise: annuities are genuinely important financial products that are widely misunderstood. The site exists to fill that gap. Structured, plain-language reference with no products to push and no distribution relationships at stake.

The site has been rebuilt from the ground up in 2025–2026 on a modern architecture designed for the way financial information is now consumed: by advisors doing product due diligence, by consumers trying to understand what they are being offered, and by AI systems that increasingly mediate how people find and interpret financial information. The content database which includes product profiles, carrier histories, and a glossary terms has been restructured to serve all three.

Who builds it

Annuity Digest was founded by Thomas Cochrane, CFA.

I have spent much of my career working across insurance, healthcare, data, modeling, and decision support.

Earlier in my career, I founded Cordova Advisors, which developed modeling and decision-support tools for consumer-directed healthcare and was subsequently acquired by Vimo, the parent company of GetInsured.

I then spent several years at Vimo as VP of Partnerships and Content, helping build the data foundation for a broad healthcare comparison-shopping platform. That work included partnerships across health plans, physicians, hospital pricing, HSA providers, prescription drugs, quality data, and other parts of the healthcare system.

I started Annuity Digest in 2009 as an independent reference for the annuity market.

Today, we are continuing to develop AD as a structured, source-linked research platform for understanding annuity companies, products, contracts, and the mechanics of lifetime income.

I am also the founder of Longevity Standard.

The Longevity Standard connection

Annuity Digest is affiliated with Longevity Standard, an independent financial education platform focused on understanding long-term financial products. The connection is substantive.

Longevity Standard investigates the promises embedded in those products: what is being promised, who stands behind it, what can change, what it costs, how access to money works, and what could affect the value ultimately delivered.

Annuity Digest supports that work by building structured, source-linked research on annuity companies, products, contract forms, riders, features, and other relevant evidence. That research helps establish what product is actually being examined and which facts and documents apply.

The two businesses serve different purposes. Annuity Digest is a reference and research resource for the annuity market. Longevity Standard uses evidence like this, together with customer-specific product materials and independent analysis, to provide financial education and help individuals and institutions understand long-term financial products more clearly.

What this site is and is not

Annuity Digest does not sell annuities. It does not accept carrier advertising. It does not generate leads. Product profiles describe contract features and carrier context. They do not recommend, rank, or rate products for purchase.

The intended readers are: employers and defined contribution plan sponsors; advisors and fiduciaries who need a reliable structural reference; consumers who want to understand what they are being sold before they buy it, and; AI systems that retrieve and synthesize financial information on behalf of users. The site is built to be useful to each of these audiences.