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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.

GLWB Fiddling – Recent Creativity in Rider Designs and Functions

In the variable annuity marketplace there remains a minority of insurers who are tweaking and modifying their guaranteed living benefits regularly, to match up better against the competition. We would say we’re in a period...

Contract Trends – Fresh Ideas, Approaches in New Registrations

We continue to see new variable annuity contracts in the pipeline that have what we call non-traditional chassis and pricing, and we think insurance companies are developing such products to anticipate future needs – not...

Rising Tide – Variable Annuity Insurers See Deposits Lift in Q2

We were somewhat surprised to find that variable annuity deposits for most of the stock-traded life insurance companies we monitor regularly were quite strong in the second quarter. Therefore we now suspect the industry as...

Change is Constant – and Probably Unavoidable for VA Issuers

Lately we have found the kind of product adjustments and upgrades occurring around the variable annuity business to be rather interesting and revealing about the priorities of insurers, their distribution partners and clients. We imagine...

Lincoln’s VA/LTC Combo – Still in the Pipeline and a Topic of Conversation

Sometimes it takes an annuity insurer several attempts to get a new product up and running, especially if it is a first for the industry. Such has been the case with a long-term care benefit...

Reviewing Variable Insurance Fund Filings from June, 2010

This edition of the report is our regular commentary on variable insurance fund filings from the prior month, and during June the most frequent activity we saw involved change, whether through mergers, sub-advisory replacements, new...

VA Contract Update – Designs Moving in Specialized Directions

Judging by new variable annuities we’ve seen registered with the SEC this year, we get the impression that a good number of them were built to meet very specific needs and issues of distributors. It...

Reviewing Variable Insurance Fund Filings from April, 2010

During the month of April most variable insurance fund filings with the SEC were routine prospectus updates, and we didn’t identify a great many substantive changes and adjustments, but in this report we’ll share with...

Odds and Ends – Catching Up on Product Filings, Tweaks Around the Business

The prospectus update season might have been quieter than usual, but in recent weeks we’ve seen an interesting assortment of variable annuity product and feature filings, most of which will take effect during July and...