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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.
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VA Insurers Are Revising Their Benefits to “Ratchet Down” Risk

To continue discussing our theme of last week, we’re sure that current financial market conditions are forcing variable annuity insurers to re-evaluate the living benefit guarantees they are selling. Third quarter results should provide us...

Musing on the State of Variable Annuities During the Current Market Turmoil

Recently we’ve been contemplating the “value proposition” of the variable annuity, how the product might be positioned and sold given the existing market climate. Earnings season is now underway and we think results from last...

Making Sense of All the Movement – VA Contracts, Riders Set for Q4 Debuts

This week we’ll comment on an assortment of recent product moves within the variable annuity space, and we must say that we aren’t seeing a major slowdown in the rate of activity, as there are...

Competition, Downturns, Volatility – What’s Been on People’s Minds in Q3

The third quarter is coming to a close and it was a rough one for the financial markets, to say the least. Throughout that time we’ve had informal discussions with our industry contacts as to...

Variable Annuity Contract Notes: Checking Back in on the Newest Registrations

Over the past several weeks we’ve taken some time to pore over new variable annuity contract registrations, including those we started monitoring last year, and in this commentary we’ll discuss what we learned from that...

Reviewing Variable Insurance Fund Filings from August, 2008

This week we return to our monthly task of commenting on SEC filings related to variable insurance portfolios, and during August we noticed interesting new registrations and amendments that we believe have a direct connection...

An Update – Directions in Variable Annuity Guaranteed Living Benefit Assets

Recently we devoted some more time to sifting through insurers’ financial documents to gather data on variable annuity guaranteed living benefit account values, because we believe the data provide clues as to product priorities around...

Atypical Designs in Variable Annuity GLWBs Sold in the State of New York

Anyone who’s been around the industry for awhile knows that the state of New York does things differently than most other jurisdictions, usually placing very firm restrictions on policies and features before they are approved....

VA Deposits, Net Flows in 2Q08 – A Few Bright Spots Amid Cloudy Skies

Now that Q2 earnings season has wrapped up for variable annuity insurers we usually cover, we saw that deposits and net flows of most of them dropped, however a few had increases. In this commentary...