Rating, bond and securities analysts at the S&P Global insurance conference said they are happy with the overall state of the U.S. life insurance industry.
The companies have coped well with the effects of the Great Recession and low interest rates, and they look as if they may be starting to come up a strategy for transferring annuity guarantee risk to other entities, the analysts said here today in New York, during several conference sessions.
The S&P conference is important because S&P views of insurers affect how much the insurers pay for financing and how much they can charge for insurance.
But Thomas Gallagher, a life insurance industry analyst at Evercore Partners Inc., and Robert Hauff, an insurance bond analyst at Wells Fargo Securities, said during a session on life sector trends that they still have concerns about insurers with large amounts of stand-alone long-term care insurance on their books.
(Related: Investors Helping Life Insurers Shift to Pension Transfer Market: Analyst)
In the life sector as a whole, “I’m not seeing anything that’s keeping me up at night,” Hauff said.
Hauff emphasized that he believes that even most of the companies with large blocks of long-term care insurance business on their books will simply go through a few quarters of big reserve increases and then move on.