Research & Reports
Reviewing Variable Insurance Fund Filings from June, 2011
In this, our regular commentary about variable insurance funds from the prior month, we’ll start off by saying this June we saw a familiar pattern for the time of year, namely that there were not...
Emerging Details – Regarding MetLife’s New VA Guaranteed Benefits
Since we published our last report, we discovered that MetLife registered its new variable annuity guaranteed benefits with the Florida insurance department, and that filing contained more information – albeit some of it bracketed –...
“Cliffhanger” Filings – Containing New Guaranteed Benefits from MetLife
Late last week MetLife submitted initial registrations of several new variable annuity guaranteed death and income benefits to the SEC, and we thought this was noteworthy for a number of reasons. In this report we’ll...
Reviewing Variable Insurance Fund Filings from May, 2011
We thought the month of May was rather active in terms of SEC filings related to variable insurance underlying funds. There was an interesting mix of movement: sub-account platforms were streamlined, new management fee arrangements...
Hartford Launches New VA Products – at an Interesting Time for the Industry
Today Hartford announced the launch of new variable annuity contracts and benefits as part of an initiative to re-energize its sales in the U.S. In this commentary we’ll give our thoughts on this move, given...
Chassis Variations – Reflecting a Trend in VA Specialization
In recent months there’s been quite a bit of filing activity related to variable annuity contracts, and we think this is due to distributors getting more involved in the manufacturing process. Many SEC documents we’ve...
Reviewing Variable Insurance Fund Filings from April, 2011
The volume of variable insurance fund filings with the SEC during the month of April was fairly slow as compared with other months of the year. We didn’t see any new registrations and we figure...
“In Sync” – VA Sales in 1Q11 Followed Flow of the Financial Markets
Variable annuity sales for stock-traded insurers we cover regularly were split down the middle in the first quarter of this year, one half reporting some measure of improvement sequentially while the rest did not fare...
Issues of Interest – Based on Questions We’ve Fielded, and Recent Filing Activity
We are in the latter stages of the variable annuity prospectus update season and over the past few weeks we have fielded product related questions which we think are indicative of what folks in the...