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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 Revising Their Benefits to “Ratchet Down” Risk

To continue discussing our theme of last week, we’re sure that current financial market conditions are forcing variable annuity insurers to re-evaluate the living benefit guarantees they are selling. Third quarter results should provide us...

Musing on the State of Variable Annuities During the Current Market Turmoil

Recently we’ve been contemplating the “value proposition” of the variable annuity, how the product might be positioned and sold given the existing market climate. Earnings season is now underway and we think results from last...

Reviewing Variable Insurance Fund Filings from September, 2008

In this commentary we’ll return to our regular task of covering highlights of variable insurance fund filings from the past month, and in September we saw a wide variety of modifications made to platforms –...

Competition, Downturns, Volatility – What’s Been on People’s Minds in Q3

The third quarter is coming to a close and it was a rough one for the financial markets, to say the least. Throughout that time we’ve had informal discussions with our industry contacts as to...

Reviewing Variable Insurance Fund Filings from August, 2008

This week we return to our monthly task of commenting on SEC filings related to variable insurance portfolios, and during August we noticed interesting new registrations and amendments that we believe have a direct connection...

An Update – Directions in Variable Annuity Guaranteed Living Benefit Assets

Recently we devoted some more time to sifting through insurers’ financial documents to gather data on variable annuity guaranteed living benefit account values, because we believe the data provide clues as to product priorities around...

Atypical Designs in Variable Annuity GLWBs Sold in the State of New York

Anyone who’s been around the industry for awhile knows that the state of New York does things differently than most other jurisdictions, usually placing very firm restrictions on policies and features before they are approved....

VA Deposits, Net Flows in 2Q08 – A Few Bright Spots Amid Cloudy Skies

Now that Q2 earnings season has wrapped up for variable annuity insurers we usually cover, we saw that deposits and net flows of most of them dropped, however a few had increases. In this commentary...

Diverse Thoughts on Directions in the VA Industry, Topics to Keep Tabs On

Second-quarter earnings season for insurers is just getting underway and we’re quite curious to see how variable annuity sales and flows held up for the leading companies, given the many stressors – from without and...