Research & Reports

We’re constantly maintaining that the importance of living benefits to the variable annuity business cannot be overstated. Although most of the market right now is concentrated on lifetime withdrawal benefits, there’s been resurgence in competition...

In this report, our last of the year, we’ll conclude our two-part commentary summarizing key forces influencing the sale of variable annuities in 2007 – our main three being “features, shelf space and scale” –...

In getting started with the New Year, we’ll comment on a growing tendency for insurers to trim the number of sub-account options and features on their variable annuities in order to make them simpler for...

Over the month of October, we identified 46 new variable funds registered, and these reflected the current popular interest in hedging and shorting strategies, Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs), and the use of mathematical modeling in devising...

The third quarter was a mixed bag for the nine major public variable insurers we regularly track, as all saw sales levels fall sequentially, but apparently these companies don’t feel the results were troubling and...

Over the month of August we saw a pickup in the rate of new variable insurance fund registrations, with eight coming out. In addition there were many adjustments done to fund platforms – albeit in...

In composing our usual roundup of variable fund filings from the previous month, we did not see a great many new registrations in July. We identified just two, but they were fairly notable: one was...

We identified 14 new variable insurance funds filed in the month of June, a fairly good number. In addition, activity was fairly energetic around sub-advisory and name changes, mergers, closings and other modifications, covering a...

Insurers have long offered various types of asset allocation and rebalancing services to their variable contract holders, to help them diversify and manage the risk associated with their sub-accounts. In fact, the performance of models...