In the first quarter, clients flocked to individual life insurance products with performance that was tied to investment indexes, according to new life sales survey data from Wink.
Clients also increased purchases of simple, classic whole life policies.
Clients reduced purchases of traditional, middle-of-the-road universal life policies.
Wink is a life and annuity market tracking firm based in Des Moines, Iowa. Its U.S. individual life survey figures reflect only the performance of non-variable, permanent life products, not of products such as term life or variable universal life.
What It Means
Clients seem to be going with plain vanilla products when their top fear is volatility, and with products that offer access to big performance gains when their top fear is inflation.
The Wink results are relevant to retirement advisors as well as life insurance professionals and estate planners, because clients often use permanent life products in income planning arrangements and other complex planning arrangements.
The Numbers
Here’s how the Wink life numbers looked in the first quarter and how those numbers have changed since the first quarter of 2021:
- Indexed life: $630 million (up 18%).
- Whole life: $1.1 billion (up 5.3%).
- Fixed universal life: $107 million (down 11%).
The numbers are based on survey responses from 103 insurers.
What Sheryl Moore Is Seeing
Sheryl Moore, the CEO of Wink, notes in her assessment of the latest survey results that 80% of the top 10 indexed life sellers had double-digit or triple-digit sales increases over the same period in 2021.
“Next quarter should also yield positive results for indexed life sales, and this year will likely set record sales,” Moore said.
Moore said Wink expects that whole life sales will continue to fare well for the rest of the year.
Some analysts have suggested that increases in interest rates should help traditional universal life policies, but Wink has not yet detected any signs of a broad recovery in sales of that product.
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