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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.

GLWB Fiddling – Recent Creativity in Rider Designs and Functions

In the variable annuity marketplace there remains a minority of insurers who are tweaking and modifying their guaranteed living benefits regularly, to match up better against the competition. We would say we’re in a period...

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...

Risk Sensitivity – As it Relates to VA Insurers’ Guaranteed Benefits

In our regular duties we are mostly occupied with following manufacturing trends in the variable annuity business, endeavoring to sort out what is meaningful from what is not. However we also are very interested in...

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...

Change is Constant – and Probably Unavoidable for VA Issuers

Lately we have found the kind of product adjustments and upgrades occurring around the variable annuity business to be rather interesting and revealing about the priorities of insurers, their distribution partners and clients. We imagine...

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...

Lincoln’s VA/LTC Combo – Still in the Pipeline and a Topic of Conversation

Sometimes it takes an annuity insurer several attempts to get a new product up and running, especially if it is a first for the industry. Such has been the case with a long-term care benefit...

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...