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Bryan Pinsky

Life Health > Annuities > Fixed Annuities

Retirees Need Simple, Stable Annuity Options: Corebridge

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Multi-year guaranteed annuities (MYGAs) are like the hammer in the carpenter’s toolbox. They’re so common they often get overlooked.

But Bryan Pinsky, president of individual retirement at Corebridge Financial, said in a recent interview that Corebridge is happy to be in the multi-year market.

“It’s a very robust and very important market for retirees,” Pinsky said. “We’ve been very happy with that market as rates have been going up.”

Why it matters: The health of the multi-year guaranteed annuities market is critical to retirement savers, because they use the product to protect some or all of their most conservatively managed assets.

The basics: A MYGA is an annuity contract that pays a fixed, guaranteed rate of interest for a specified number of years.

Multi-year guaranteed annuities contracts accounted for 43% of all first-half individual deferred U.S. annuity sales tracked by Wink surveys. MYGA sales increased 71% between the first half of 2022 and the first half of this year, to $70 billion, as total individual deferred annuity sales increased 24%.

Corebridge completed $4.3 billion in MYGA sales in the first half of this year.

At least one player in the market has expressed dissatisfaction: Earlier in the year, Marc Rowan, the CEO of Apollo Global Management, Athene’s parent, suggested that the MYGA market was unappealing.

Pinsky’s views: Pinsky declined to talk about how other players see the MYGA market.

Pinsky said he sees the multi-year guaranteed annuity as a simple, well-established product that’s been popular with retirement savers for decades.

Some could see today’s indexed annuities as offshoots of MYGA contracts, but the multi-year guaranteed annuity itself has remained relatively stable over the years, and the recent increase in interest rates has expanded the universe of MYGA issuers, Pinsky said.

Retirement savers often compare multi-year guaranteed annuities with bank certificates of deposit.

In the past two years, Pinsky said, rising rates have made MYGAs more competitive with other retirement savings and investment vehicles.

For Corebridge, he said, marketing multi-year guaranteed annuities tends to involve educating advisors about the recent increases in rates.

Managing the assets supporting MYGA obligations involves careful matching of asset durations and the durations of the obligation to the retirement savers, Pinsky said.

“They’re entrusting us with their hard-earned retirement savings,” he said. “We have to make good on that promise.”

Bryan Pinsky. Credit: Corebridge


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