Research & Reports

In the variable annuity marketplace guaranteed living benefits have certainly proven their worth, although there are some types that have just not gotten as much acceptance as others for various reasons. Even so, it’s our...

As more Baby Boomers reach retirement age, financial services firms will be competing over who will manage the trillions of dollars these folks have socked away in their defined contribution (DC) plans. We anticipate a...

One of the many research activities we’ve taken upon ourselves is to monitor new variable annuity registrations, in order to be up on the latest industry priorities in terms of product development. We recently caught...

Even though not even two months has elapsed, much activity has occurred since we last weighed in on new group annuity certificate products that were built to wrap lifetime withdrawal benefits around retail mutual funds...

We’re just entering the season where new variable annuity product filings really begin to pick up, and there’s ample evidence that the guaranteed living benefit arms race is still being waged with great gusto. To...

This year is shaping up as one that will be marked by heated competition among variable annuity issuers over the generosity of their Guaranteed Lifetime Withdrawal Benefits (GLWBs), and we will be watching to see...

As the holiday season is now upon us, in our last commentary of the year we’ll take the opportunity to quickly consider how things went for the variable annuity business in 2006, using currently-available data,...

After reviewing third-quarter variable annuity deposits and net flows for the group of major publicly-traded insurers we regularly track, we found most of them endured at least a slight decrease in deposits compared to the...

For the month August, we conducted our regular “rummage” through SEC filings related to variable insurance funds and found a large and diverse group of documents, many of them centering on mergers and consolidations, sub-advisory...