Research & Reports

First quarter earnings season concluded last week for the publicly-traded insurers we regularly monitor, and for most of them, variable annuity deposits and net flows declined, much as we expected. What surprised us were accounting...

A number of leading variable annuity insurers have started to take more drastic steps to trim their risk profiles, cut costs and otherwise regroup during this difficult period, and we expect more activity of this...

Since the second half of last year, the variable annuity business has been in transition, and a nearly constant stream of adjustments have been made to contracts, riders, not to mention other things, these certainly...

Lately we’ve learned there was movement along the variable annuity sales leader board during the fourth quarter. For now we think the top 25 will remain in place, with some shifting within that group, although...

We have a feeling this spring will be a busy one for the variable annuity business because in addition to submitting annual prospectus updates, most insurers will be looking to adjust their contract and benefit...

Fourth-quarter earnings season has almost concluded and in this report we’ll offer our customary review of variable annuity operating results for selected publicly-traded insurers. As we expected, most companies went through a difficult time during...

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...

By now it’s obvious that in the variable annuity business leading players have either started to cut back on the generosity of their guaranteed benefits or are thinking strongly about doing so, since the downturn...

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...