Research & Reports
Reviewing Variable Insurance Fund Filings from January, 2008
Product creation in variable insurance funds these days is greatly influenced by the need for insurers to have their sub-accounts like up with the risk management programs backing up their living benefit guarantees, thus we’re...
Market Volatility Persists, Impacting Public Insurers’ VA Results in 4Q07
Usually at the end of each year variable annuity sales rebound from the slow period of the summer, however the fourth quarter of 2007 contained a mixture of good and bad for the public insurers...
The 7% Solution – Leading VA Players Vying Over GLWB Base Increases
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...
Reviewing Variable Insurance Fund Filings from December, 2007
We conducted our regular monitoring of variable fund-related filings to wrap up the last month of 2007 and found evidence of investment trends we’ve been seeing in the industry. New funds-of-funds (F-of-Fs) of different types...
Picking Up Where We Left Off – Another Spate of New VA Withdrawal Riders
It’s only January but we need to comment again on variable annuity living benefit proliferation because, bridging the very end of last year into this one, a number of insurers have filed new or enhanced...
Reflecting on the Year Almost Past: 2006 in the Variable Annuity Business
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,...
What the Competition Dictates: Continual Refinements to VA Benefit Features
This year might be winding down, but in the variable annuity space we are still encountering registrations of new living benefits and enhancements to existing ones, although a good portion of them won’t actually roll...
Reviewing Variable Insurance Fund Filings from October, 2007
After conducting our usual compilation and review of variable fund-related filings, for October we identified 12 new registrations, most of them funds-of-funds (F-of-Fs), and in this report we’ll review them and also comment on interesting...
How We Did Last Summer – Appraising Public Insurers’ VA Results from 3Q07
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...