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Life Health > Life Insurance > Permanent Life Insurance

Nationwide and RetireOne Adjust Menus for Volatile Markets

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What You Need to Know

  • New product features could help retirement investors who are nervous about playing with volatility defend their chips.
  • Nationwide has added indexes to an indexed universal life policy index menu.
  • RetireOne is making the Constance bolt-on annuitization feature available with 255 more investment options.

The market keeps going up, and down, a lot.

Nationwide and RetireOne have announced life and annuity product extension features that could appeal to retirement savers who are nervous about that.

What It Means

Sometimes, companies add product flexibility to appeal to consumers’ optimism.

This week, menu expansion may be about giving retirement savers more ways to defend themselves against investment market volatility.

Nationwide

Nationwide is adding to the index menu for the Nationwide Indexed Universal Life Accumulator II 2020 life insurance policy.

The Nationwide IUL Accumulator II 2020 policy is really a product that consumers can use to generate retirement income as easily as to create a death benefit.

The new indexes on the index menu are the J.P. Morgan Mercury Index and the BNP Paribas Global H-Factor Index.

The J.P. Morgan Mercury Index is an index that “measures market conditions and the current stage of the business cycle, diversified fixed income, and volatility-based commodities,” according to Nationwide.

The BNP Paribas index “helps keep volatility low and provides more stable and consistent returns through a methodology that identifies and removes overpriced stocks,” the company says.

Nationwide reports that the managers of both index programs will try to limit the effects of market volatility by choosing investments based on the business cycle, and by trying to remove the potential for human bias.

RetireOne and Midland National

RetireOne and Midland National have made the Constance plug-in annuitization module available with more mutual funds, ETFs and model investment portfolios.

RetireOne and Midland National Life Insurance Co., an arm of Sammons Financial Group, introduced the Constance contingent deferred annuity, or CDA, in 2021.

A CDA is a lifetime income protection product. It includes all of the machinery in an individual annuity that can provide a lifetime stream of income, other than the investment portfolio used to support the lifetime income guarantee.

A retirement saver can attach the Constance CDA to any investment portfolio that meets RetireOne and Midland National’s CDA program portfolio standards.

Buyers and their advisors can choose whether to attach the CDA to funds on a preapproved investment menu, or to combine the CDA with a homegrown portfolio.

RetireOne said it and Midland National have now added 255 mutual funds, ETFs and model portfolios to the list of preapproved investments that are easy to plug into a Constance CDA.

The companies have added options from Cambridge Investments, Fidelity Investments, Inspire ETFs, Invesco, iShares, Nuveen and Schwab. The additions increase the total number of menu entries to 390.

RetireOne and Midland National have also added 60 more model portfolios to the preapproved investment list. The model portfolios come from American Funds, Delaware Funds, Dimensional Fund Advisors, Dynamic Wealth Management, Horizon Investments, Inspire ETFs and WealthCare Capital Management.

The companies have also introduced a Portfolio Builder tool that can help RIAs build Constance-compatible portfolios of mutual funds and ETFs.

Other Life and Annuity News

Everydays, a company that sells retirement, health and end-of-life planning products aimed at consumers ages 60 and older through a digital system, has agreed to distribute life insurance and retirement planning services from Vantis Life, a Penn Mutual subsidiary.

AM Best has introduced a new Solvency II Life Underwriting by Line of Business template for the BestLink for Excel system. The template can help advisors, actuaries and others with an interest in the financial strength of European life insurers track the insurers’ performance. The template can help users see the data for premiums, claims and expenses for each life insurance-related line of business at many major life insurers.

(Image: 18percentgrey/Shutterstock)


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