Research & Reports

Lately the surging sales of registered index-linked annuities (RILAs) have led insurers and other financial firms to join the bandwagon and come up with variations on them. We’re not sure whether all these new designs...

Variable annuity filing activity tends to slow down during the summer, however this year we expect things to be a bit different. A good number of insurers have not weighed in with certain in-favor products,...

For most of the public insurers we regularly track, annuity gross sales improved in the first quarter, building on momentum the industry generated over the latter part of 2020. Net flows for several carriers were...

At present, variable annuity insurers who want to be at the top of the sales leaderboard must pull off a bit of a balancing act in our view: they must sell guaranteed living benefits (GLBs)...

In this commentary we’ll get caught up with product filing activity of recent months, in which we saw plenty of new concepts entering the pipeline – most of them related to registered index-linked annuities (RILAs),...

Now that spring is upon us, the worst of the COVID-19 crisis hopefully over, and the first quarter of the year is drawing to a close, we have started to get a handle on where...

Since it’s become ever more common for insurers to design variable annuity benefits with components that can be changed periodically via rate sheet, we now consider the monitoring of such benefits as one of the...

This will be our customary year-end report, based on what we know from U.S. annuity industry data through the third quarter. It certainly goes without saying that 2020 was a trying one for us all,...

It’s about time we got caught up with variable annuity benefit rate sheets because much has happened since we last visited the subject. Most changes insurers have been making of late involve de-risking – even...