Research & Reports
A Shift in the Living Benefit Arms Race – VA Insurers Start to Scale Back
In the past six years the variable annuity industry has been marked by fierce competition between insurers over who has the richest guaranteed living benefits, a phenomenon that has come to be known as the...
Q3 Commentary Part II – Risks, Returns are Main Themes in VA Insurers’ Reports
In wrapping up our third quarter reporting on selected variable annuity insurers, we’ll say that it seems clear that for now, investors are still reluctant to purchase VAs during troubling market conditions such as the...
Our Q3 Commentary Part I – Variable Annuity Insurers Face a Difficult Time
This is the first installment of our third quarter commentary on variable annuity results for selected insurers we monitor regularly, and next week we’ll follow up on others that have not yet reported. Thus far,...
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...
Reviewing Variable Insurance Fund Filings from September, 2008
In this commentary we’ll return to our regular task of covering highlights of variable insurance fund filings from the past month, and in September we saw a wide variety of modifications made to platforms –...
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...