Research & Reports
Thoughts on Variable Annuity Contract Share Classes – and Suitability
This commentary will be a short reflection on how a distribution arm of Voya Financial has curtailed the sale of certain variable annuity share classes with guaranteed benefits, at the insistence of regulators. It’s our...
Income Considerations – That Will Affect Annuity Products in the Future
This commentary will be a brief reflection on recent developments regarding the income-taking aspects of annuities that we think our subscribers should monitor – as it’s not clear to us yet how much of an...
Reviewing Variable Insurance Fund Filings from July, 2015
This July was pretty lively in terms of variable fund filing activity, as we’re used to things slowing down in the summer. In this report we’ll cover some interesting new fund registrations, plus the usual...
Thoughts from Q2 Earnings Season – We Suspect VA Sales Improved
Overall, we’re of the opinion that second quarter earnings for stock-traded insurers we watch regularly were pretty strong, and for all of them, variable annuity sales went up sequentially, thus we suspect the industry experienced...
AXA Files New Form of Variable Annuity Benefit Buyout – with Options
This year we’ve been expecting to see more insurers offer variable annuity benefit buyback programs, but so far only the same small number of companies has done so. Late last week one member of this...
Reviewing an Interesting New Forethought VA ̶ and Other Recent Filings
At this point in the summer, variable annuity product pipeline activity has slowed considerably – as is typical for the time of year – however we did see a recent contract registration from Forethought Life...
Reviewing Variable Insurance Fund Filings from June, 2015
This commentary is our customary look back at noteworthy variable insurance fund filings from the previous month. In June there were a few new registrations and yet many more instances – like we’ve seen of...
An Outlook on 2Q15 VA Sales – and Some Notes on Recent Product Filings
Although it will take time for second quarter variable annuity sales data to come out, in this commentary we’ll give our suspicions on how the industry might have moved during that time period. The numbers...
Corrections: New Guaranteed Lifetime Withdrawal Benefits Filed in 2015
This table corrects our coverage of new variable annuity lifetime withdrawal benefits filed with the SEC in 2015; it includes benefits that were inadvertently omitted in our prior research posted last week…
