subscriber-login-icon
Subscriber Login

Research & Reports

Soleares Research, LLC is a market research and consulting firm servicing the annuity and life insurance businesses. We provide, through our website, periodic articles that cover important industry trends; we also offer clients phone or on-site consultations, executive briefings and presentations. We pride ourselves on first-class customer service and responsiveness to our clients. We aim to be an indispensable resource to the marketplace.

VA Insurers are Downshifting, Looking to Trim Risk on their GLWBs

During the first half of this year, a few variable annuity insurers were still selling relatively rich Guaranteed Lifetime Withdrawal Benefits (GLWBs), looking to grab market share at a time when most competitors were scaling...

Upward Market Movement Provided Relief to Insurers’ VA Risk Levels

The recovery in the financial markets that took place in the second quarter not only helped variable annuity sales bounce back for most insurers, another positive development was a reduction in the levels of risk...

2Q09 Brought a Degree of Recovery for the Markets – and the VA Business

It’s once again time for us to offer our quarterly commentary on variable annuity sales for the stock-traded insurers we regularly monitor, and to discuss relevant themes facing the industry. We’ll start off by saying...

Early Impressions of 2Q09 VA Sales Results, Who is Gaining Momentum

Recently we’ve been soliciting opinions (and, we must admit, a few rumors) from our industry contacts on which variable annuity players got some sales momentum during the second quarter, to help us get some early...

Works in Progress: Contingent Annuities for Mutual Funds, Managed Accounts

For some months we’ve been planning to provide an update on annuities constructed to wrap living benefits around retail mutual funds and brokerage accounts, because we haven’t checked in on them for a while and...

Update: Summaries of Contingent Annuity Contracts

This table contains summaries of contingent annuity contracts, which are products built to wrap living benefits around retail mutual funds and brokerage accounts, dating to when the first ones were filed, back in 2006…

Reviewing Variable Insurance Fund Filings from June, 2009

In this report we’ll offer our monthly notes and comments on variable insurance fund filings, and we’d describe June as having been not very active in terms of new registrations, but there were numerous mergers,...

An Ongoing Process – Finding Significance in VA Industry Product Changes

Because of the steady flow of tweaks and adjustments insurers have been making to their variable annuity offerings, it’s not easy to determine which changes are meaningful, and which are simply “noise.” In this commentary...

Spanning the Seasons – VA Product Launches Scheduled for Summer and Fall

As we commence the third quarter – usually a pretty slow period for variable industry sales – the pace of de-risking seems to be settling down a bit, but the process is not over by...