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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.

At Summer’s End – VA Insurers Were Making Further Product Adjustments

Over the last few weeks of this summer we noticed an interesting mixture of variable annuity product movements, a good number scheduled to take effect during the fall, which we’ll cover in this commentary.  We...

Some Thoughts About the Future of VAs – and Annuities in General

Now that summer is winding down, we’ll take the opportunity to offer up a short reflection on where the variable annuity business stands right now and where it may be headed.  We believe that the...

A Season of Change: VA Sales Fall as Insurers Cut Back on Their Products

The year 2012 was a time when insurers made reductions to their variable annuity products: these moves included the trimming of guarantees, fee increases, closures of contracts and riders, installation of tighter investment restrictions, cuts...

A Holiday Respite? VA Product Activity Seems to be Simmering Down

Over the past few weeks the pace of product filing in the variable annuity business has slowed, as has the amount of chatter coming through the rumor mill, and we attribute these conditions to the...

Changing Minds – VA Insurers Cancel, Adjust, Postpone Products

By the looks of things, we are entering a period of de-risking around the variable annuity space, brought on by a variety of pressures, among them market volatility, low interest rates, and abrupt spikes in...

Works in Progress: Contingent Annuities for Mutual Funds, Managed Accounts

For some months we’ve been planning to provide an update on annuities constructed to wrap living benefits around retail mutual funds and brokerage accounts, because we haven’t checked in on them for a while and...

Insurers Are Ironing Out Details of Group Annuity Certificate Products

Even though not even two months has elapsed, much activity has occurred since we last weighed in on new group annuity certificate products that were built to wrap lifetime withdrawal benefits around retail mutual funds...

“New Wave” Annuities – Offer Living Benefits to Funds, Managed Accounts

Now that the appeal of variable annuity guaranteed living benefits has been firmly established – and has grown steadily over the past several years, greatly helping insurers sustain growth – it seems only natural that...

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,...