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
Catherine Seifert. Credit: CFRA

Life Health > Annuities

The Annuity Market Might Split: CFRA Analyst

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

A split between two different kinds of life insurance company owners could lead to a split in the U.S. retail annuity market.

Catherine Seifert, a vice president at CFRA Research, discusses that possibility in a new review of U.S. and Canadian life insurers.

“Private equity” firms, or investment firms, have bought some annuity issuers. Other big annuity issuers, including MassMutual, New York Life, Nationwide and Pacific Life, are “mutual insurers,” or insurers owned by their policyholders.

Because the mutual insurers are owned by the policyholders, “they are more likely to be focused on financial strength for the sake of policyholders instead of boosting profitability for investors,” Seifert suggested.

The private equity firms may have had a tendency to acquire poorly performing blocks of annuities, and, because of pressure to improve the performance of those blocks, they “are likely to take steps to increase profitability, which could include curtailing certain contract benefits and guarantees,” she said.

What It Means

Today, some private equity-owned life insurers look as if they’re competing hard to offer your clients great annuity deals.

In the long run, if Seifert is correct, the mutuals could have a tendency to offer better price, crediting rate and financial strength rating combinations.

Assets

Many analyses of the U.S. retail annuity market focus on sales.

Seifert looked at assets and asset growth as well as sales.

She noted that, although the share of variable annuity sales as a percentage of all sales has fallen, variable annuity assets still accounted for $2.1 trillion, or 66%, of U.S. insurers’ $3.3 trillion in individual annuity assets at the end of 2022.

But the compound annual growth rate for variable annuity assets was just 2.2% during the 10-year period ending in 2022, compared with a 10-year compound annual growth rate of about 3% for all annuities and of about 4.8% for traditional fixed annuities and non-variable indexed annuities.

The Future

Although different life insurers could adopt different strategies, overall, “robust demand for annuities will likely be the primary growth catalyst for many of these firms,” Seifert predicted.

She estimated that sales of non-variable indexed annuities will increase by 14% this year, to $354 billion, and by another 11% in 2024, to $392 billion.

Even though new variable annuity sales have been soft, a recovery in stock prices has increased variable annuity asset values, and Seifert believes revenue related to increased variable annuity asset values could also help annuity issuers’ performance.

Catherine Seifert. Credit: CFRA


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.