About
We sat with the wholesalers first.
Vellum is built for IMOs — the firms that recruit, contract, and support the independent advisors selling annuities. The contracting workflow IMOs actually run is broken in a way nobody outside the industry sees. Four to six systems per submission. Manual copy-paste between portals. Fax machines, in 2026. We watched it for months, then built the dashboard that should have existed all along.
How it started
The first hundred hours were watching.
We talked to wholesalers managing hundreds of advisors across a dozen carriers. We sat next to them while they contracted a single advisor and timed it. Eleven days, twenty-three emails, four logins, two faxes. By the end of it the wholesaler couldn’t tell us with confidence where the contract was without opening four tabs.
That’s the moment Vellum stopped being a hypothesis and started being a product. Not a tool that helps wholesalers manage the existing chaos — a workflow that removes the chaos.
Today every screen in Vellum is a direct response to something we watched a wholesaler struggle with. The intake form is one screen because they told us the worst part was retyping the same advisor across six portals. The pipeline answers “where is it?” in a glance because that question came up forty-one times in a single morning.
How we build
Four rules. We refer back to them often.
01
Principle
The advisor record is the source of truth.
Every screen reads from one record per advisor. No duplicate-entry, no version drift. Get the data right once and every contract reads from that single moment.
02
Principle
Status should never be a guess.
Where is Margaret's Athene contract? In Vellum that's a one-click answer, with the audit trail attached. We treat 'where is it?' as the central question of the workflow.
03
Principle
Speak the industry's language.
NPN. Resident state. Appointment. Carrier review. We use the words wholesalers actually use. No 'activate your account' or 'unlock the experience' — it's not that kind of product.
04
Principle
Quiet beats loud.
This is for senior wholesalers who've been doing this for fifteen years. The product earns trust by looking like it belongs in a regulated industry — restrained colour, editorial typography, nothing flashy.
Get in touch
Reach out.We’re still listening.
The roadmap is open. If your firm has a workflow we haven’t addressed, write us.