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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.

Back to School – Viewpoints on VA Industry Issues as Q3 Winds Down

The weather has gotten cooler, football season has commenced, and families are back from vacation, all these things serving to remind us that we are coming to the end of the third quarter. In this...

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...

Q2 Expectations – For Variable Annuity Industry Sales, Net Flows

Second-quarter earnings season for insurance companies is now underway and we’re looking forward to learning how variable annuity sales went, however we are not very optimistic about how the industry as a whole fared, for...

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...

Competitive Notes – “Must Have” Features for VA Products, Riders

Over the recent past, product filing around the variable annuity industry has been somewhat slower than usual, which to us suggests that any moves companies are making are meaningful from a competitive standpoint. In this...

GLWB Update – Newest Riders Contain Risk-Related Components

There’s little doubt variable annuity insurers are carefully monitoring their benefit risk levels, leading them to come out with new Guaranteed Lifetime Withdrawal Benefits (GLWBs) with elements that will make adjustments to ward off the...

Variable Annuity Sales from 1Q10 – Could The Industry Be Back on Track?

The fortunes of the variable annuity business are still largely dictated by the performance of companies with the most attractive guaranteed living benefits, and, based on some improvement we saw from a few insurers we...

The Adjustment Game – There’s No Set Formula to Tweaking VA Products

We are accustomed to seeing numerous variable annuity ideas get introduced in early spring, however lately things have become slower than usual. We attribute this to insurers being a bit tentative about taking any serious...