Close Close
Popular Financial Topics Discover relevant content from across the suite of ALM legal publications From the Industry More content from ThinkAdvisor and select sponsors Investment Advisor Issue Gallery Read digital editions of Investment Advisor Magazine Tax Facts Get clear, current, and reliable answers to pressing tax questions
Luminaries Awards
ThinkAdvisor
A percentage sign with a lock on it

Life Health > Annuities

Life Insurers Kept Selling More Fixed Annuities in Q2

X
Your article was successfully shared with the contacts you provided.

What You Need to Know

  • Sales of both variable and non-variable products increased.
  • Secure 2.0 may have helped sales of immediate and deferred income annuities.
  • Sales of traditional variable annuities struggled.

Life insurers are continuing to sell more annuity products with fixed benefit guarantees — in spite of their efforts to limit their exposure to annuity guarantee risk.

Total sales of U.S. individual annuities increased 12% between the second quarter of 2022 and the second quarter of this year, to $88.6 billion, according to new LIMRA data.

Sales of annuities with fixed guarantees, including non-variable indexed annuities, climbed 29%, to $31.7 billion.

Provisions in the Setting Every Community Up for Retirement Enhancement 2.0 Act, or Secure 2.0, that promote use of income annuities may have combined with higher interest rates to boost sales both of immediate income annuities and deferred income annuities. Sales of traditional variable annuities, which offer returns tied to the performance of investment funds, fell.

Todd Giesing, an assistant vice president with the LIMRA Annuity Research unit, predicted that individual annuity sales will continue to be strong for the rest of the year. “Economic conditions continue to be favorable,” he said.

What It Means

Clients are continuing to seek products that can provide an insured stream of income.

Many life insurers have talked about limiting their own exposure to changes in interest rates and stock prices.

The companies that issue the annuities, or “direct writers,” are reconciling their sales goals and their risk-management goals by sharing responsibility for annuity guarantee risk with outside investors, through reinsurance arrangements.

If the reinsurance arrangements do well, the investors who put money into the arrangements will earn significant profits.

If the arrangements fail, the direct writers will have to recapture the annuity guarantee risk transferred to the reinsurers, under the terms of life reinsurance treaty recapture provisions, and make good on the contract obligations.

The Survey Numbers

LIMRA is a Windsor, Connecticut-based organization that helps financial services companies conduct market research and other types of research. It bases its quarterly annuity sales reports on the results from issuer surveys.

Here’s how sales of six types of annuities changed between the second quarter of 2022 and the latest quarter:

  • Fixed-rate deferred annuities: $31.7 billion (up from $28.7 billion)
  • Non-variable indexed annuities: $25.4 billion (up from $19.7 billion)
  • Traditional variable annuities: $13.6 billion (down from $16.5 billion)
  • Registered index-linked annuities: $11.6 billion (up from $10.8 billion)
  • Fixed immediate annuities: $3.4 billion (up from $2.0 billion)
  • Deferred income annuities: $1.08 billion (up from $520 million)

Credit: Andrey Popov/Adobe Stock


NOT FOR REPRINT

© 2024 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.