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Insurer Asks SEC For Stand-Alone Guranteed Living Benefit Rule

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Jackson National Life Insurance Company is asking the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to lighten the regulatory load for banks and insurers that sell a new type of guarantee.

Lawyers for Jackson National, Lansing, Mich., a unit of Prudential P.L.C., London, have submitted a petition asking the SEC to free state-regulated banks and insurers from Form 10-Q quarterly report and Form 10-K annual report filing requirements just because the banks and insurers sell “stand-alone guaranteed living benefits.”

Rather than guaranteeing the contract value inside a variable annuity, a stand-alone GLB rider protects the “value of the contract owner’s investments in a separate and distinct account, such as a mutual fund account, brokerage account or investment advisory account,” Stephen Roth, a Washington lawyer, writes in a letter on behalf of Jackson National.

Insurers that issue variable annuity and variable life insurance contracts can register those with the SEC using forms such as Form N-4 and Form N-6 that do not require the insurer to file Form 10-Q and Form 10-K reports, Roth writes.

Because there is no form specifically designed for the stand-alone GLB products, insurers and banks that want to offer the products must register the products using Form S-1, Roth writes.

When an insurer registers a product using Form S-1, the insurer then must comply with the Form 10-Q, Form 10-K and other form filing requirements listed in Section 13 of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, Roth writes.

Jackson National is asking the SEC to create a new rule that would free manufacturers of stand-alone GLB products from complying with the Section 13 filing requirements.

The rule, as described by Jackson National, would apply to state-regulated banks and insurers that register insurance policies, annuity contracts, funding agreements or guaranteed investment contracts using Form S-1 or Form S-3.

The companies registering those securities would be exempt from the Section 13 filing requirements if the securities were designed in such a way that the value of the securities would “not vary according to the investment experience of a separate account that is an investment company under the Investment Company Act of 1940 or would be an investment company absent an exclusion under Section 3(c) thereof,” according to an appendix to Roth’s letter.


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