
Research & Reports
On Rate Sheets – Rising Rates Help Insurers Enhance Their Benefits
Now that the second quarter is nearly over, we figured it would be a good time to get caught up with trends in variable annuity guaranteed living benefit (GLB) rate sheets, especially since insurers have...
Reviewing Variable Insurance Fund Filings from May, 2022
In May we saw an increase in variable portfolio registrations, quite a few of them of defined outcome portfolios, which in our view are gaining favor because they have downside protection features similar to registered...
Covering Filings of New VA Contracts and Living Benefit Riders
Now that the year is nearly half over, we thought it would be a great time to get caught up with new variable annuities and guaranteed living benefits (GLBs) that have been registered with the...
Shining a Spotlight – on The Growth of ESG Portfolios in the Market
Anyone who follows the financial markets knows that Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investing is one of the hottest topics out there; our objective in this report is to show how this theme has steadily...
Growth in Q1 Sales of Indexed Annuities Sustained the Industry
In this commentary we’ll share our thoughts on first quarter annuity business results of publicly traded insurers we track regularly. In our view most of these companies reflected the experience of the industry as a...
Reviewing Variable Insurance Fund Filings from April, 2022
In April we saw just a few new variable portfolio registrations and a rather mild degree of filings overall. Most filings in the month were related to changes to investment platforms…
Regarding Competition in the Registered Index-Linked Annuity Space
This year we expect registered index-linked annuities (RILAs) to continue to grow their market share, however they will encounter stiffer competition from other product types thanks to rising interest rates; moreover, things are getting tight...
Reviewing Variable Insurance Fund Filings from March, 2022
In this report we’ll cover notable fund filings from last month – as we usually do – and provide notes on variable defined outcome portfolios, as the first one commenced operations last year…
Concluding Our Coverage of Managed-Volatility Portfolios for 2021
With this report we will wrap up our coverage of trends in variable managed-volatility portfolios for 2021, based on data we compiled from regulatory filings…