Research & Reports

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

Based on our continual reading of regulatory filings, we see evidence that insurers are exercising ever more care in crafting the fees and expenses they charge on variable annuity contracts and riders, and we think...