Month: January 2019
#143 | Protective Acquires Great-West US Life & Annuity
Last week, Protective announced that it has acquired Canada’s Great-West’s US Individual Life & Annuity business. In one way, this is like yet another The Fast & The Furious movie – you know the script by now. Large insurers with…
#142 | Securian Cap Reduction
Back in 2008, Minnesota Life was just a sleepy little life insurance company in St. Paul, Minnesota. Its general account life insurance reserves were just $2.7B and it primarily distributed products through an exclusive BGA network. But then, Minnesota Life…
#141 | My Take on Indexed UL
Over the past few months, several of my friends in the industry have encouraged me to write an article that clearly, concisely and unambiguously states my position on all things Indexed UL. Although I write about Indexed UL all the…
#140 | AXA IUL Protect Series 160
What’s the name of a legendary sports car that has the distinction of being the only car, let alone sports car, where the engine hangs behind the rear wheels? You’re on the right track if you’re thinking Porsche 911, but…
#139 | Asset-Based Compensation
PennMutual’s new 2017 CSO-compliant Versatile Choice Whole Life is, in a lot of ways, not so different from its predecessor product. One thing that has changed, though, is compensation. PennMutual made a few subtle tweaks to how certain rider premium…
#138 | Indexed UL on the Risk Spectrum – Part 3
The intuition for why a higher fee to buy more index exposure delivers better returns is pretty straightforward. The higher the fee, the more downside risk but also the more leverage on upside returns. For example, let’s just assume that…
#137 | Indexed UL on the Risk Spectrum – Part 2
The previous article looked at the risk profile of Indexed UL only through the lens of capped index participation. But what about other account options and participation methods? According to some folks selling or manufacturing Indexed UL, different account options…
#136 | Leveraged Loans & Life Insurance
2/25/19 update - Bloomberg on a Fitch report about growing life insurer exposure to CLOs Over the past couple of years, the financial press and even some mainstream publications have begun to talk about a burgeoning “bubble” in leveraged loans,…
