Three big insurers have given a glimpse at the performance of their disability insurance business performance in newly released third-quarter earnings announcements.
Unum Group Corp., Chattanooga, Tenn. (NYSE:UNM), reported earlier this week the sales have been fine but that soft employment levels have bitten into revenue.
Now Hartford Financial, Hartford (NYSE:HIG), Lincoln National Corp., Radnor, Pa. (NYSE:LNC) and Prudential Financial Inc., Newark, N.J. (NYSE:PRU) have included a little more information about the disability insurance market.
Because those companies get less of their revenue from disability insurance sales, they provide less information about their disability insurance operations, but they do sprinkle a little disability data in with the rest.
Few companies go into much detail about individual disability insurance operations, and, in some cases, the group disability figures may give some clues about what’s happening in the individual disability market.
Hartford, for example, is reporting $36 million in new sales for the latest quarter on $467 million in earned premiums, fees and other considerations, down from $37 million in new sales on $487 million in earned premiums, fees and other considerations for the third quarter of 2010.
The company increased reserves, as measured using Generally Accepted Accounting Principles, to $5.3 billion, from $5.1 billion.
The economic downturn and the difficulty for getting employees to pay for contributory and voluntary products have hurt, the company says.