7 Top Trends in Retirement Planning Now

Slideshow August 15, 2022 at 09:19 AM Share & Print

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Executives from the big, publicly traded annuity issuers sometimes speak generally about aging baby boomers and financial wellness when addressing groups of financial professionals, including financial advisors.

When they’re talking to Wall Street securities analysts, during quarterly earnings conference calls, they get more specific.

For a look at some of the key points about retirement, annuities and financial advices that U.S. annuity issuers have been making during their recent conversations with analysts, see the gallery above.

(Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg)

Allison Bell

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1. Demand is strong.

Many issuers talked about seeing strong sales gains.

In addition to being a sign that many clients want to work with you to get annuities, that sales growth is a sign that plenty of insurers still want to sell your clients annuities.

(Image: Shutterstock)

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2. Higher interest rates are just starting to help.

Executives said rising interest rates are great for any new money to invest to support annuity benefits guarantee obligations, but that the rates they’re getting on money invested over the past few years are still very low.

For your clients, that means the variations between the rates similar issuers pay in similar annuity situations may grow.

The Federal Reserve Building. (Image: Shutterstock)

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3. Many insurers are cautious about guarantees.

Prudential Financial, for example, talked about reducing its exposure to traditional variable annuities with guaranteed living benefits to less than 10% of enterprise earnings.

Ellen Cooper, Lincoln Financial’s CEO, said the company has cut sales of individual annuities with guaranteed living benefits to less than 30% of the individual annuity sales total.

The bottom line: You will continue to have to look hard to find annuities with attractive benefits guarantees.

9Image: Andrii Vodolazhskyi/Shutterstock)

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4. Budgets are tight.

Many executives used terms such as “disciplined approach to expense management.”

A collision of strong sales, bean-counting and tight labor markets could lead to interesting advisor relations adventures.</p<

(Image: kan chana/Shutterstock)

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5. You matter.

Ameriprise, CNO Financial and KKR, the parent of Global Atlantic are just some of the companies that talked about the importance of strong advisor relationships and distributor relationships to their annuity business success.

(Image: Thinkstock)

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6. Issuer performance could vary.

Marc Rowan, the CEO of Athene’s parent, Apollo, observed that this is an era when having “lots of excess capital” is helpful.

If Rowan is right, the third quarter could start to create a bigger gap between the annuity issuer capital haves and the annuity issuer capital have nots, and to increase clients’ need for advisors who know which issuers are which.

Marc Rowan. (Photo: Jonathan Alcorn/Bloomberg)

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7. At least some insurers really like selling annuities.

In turbulent times, some life insurer CEOs talked about the peaceful joys of selling turbulence-resistance supplemental health insurance products.

But Gary Bhojwani, the CEO of CNO Financial — a company known for its supplemental health insurance — said during his second-quarter earnings call that increasing annuity sales has been great for CNO and its advisors.

”When consumers entrust us with their assets like annuity, the relationship changes, because now we're viewed as an investment as opposed to an expense,” Bhojwani said.

Gary Bhojwani. (Photo: CNO)

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