Research & Reports

This is our customary early retrospective of the past year for the variable annuity business, in which we’ll offer a narrative of how things unfolded chronologically in 2008, the market conditions that arose and their...

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...

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...

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....

As more Baby Boomers reach retirement age, financial services firms will be competing over who will manage the trillions of dollars these folks have socked away in their defined contribution (DC) plans. We anticipate a...

Even though not even two months has elapsed, much activity has occurred since we last weighed in on new group annuity certificate products that were built to wrap lifetime withdrawal benefits around retail mutual funds...

Because there has been a pretty sizable crop of new variable annuities filed this year with the SEC, in this week’s commentary we’ll take a break from discussing the living benefit arms race – since...

As the holiday season is now upon us, in our last commentary of the year we’ll take the opportunity to quickly consider how things went for the variable annuity business in 2006, using currently-available data,...

There’s little doubt that success in the variable annuity marketplace over the years has been largely dictated by product and distribution strength, competition depending on what’s currently in favor, whether it be the latest VA...