Commentary
#362 | Accordia and the End of an Era
Full Article Yesterday, Global Atlantic announced that “after carefully evaluating our greatest opportunities to provide the most compelling products and value…we have made the strategic decision to sharpen our focus…as a result, effective July 1, 2023, Global Atlantic will be…
#361 | Cap Price Pressure
Quick Take When AG 49 was adopted in 2015, it established the supremacy of a single crediting methodology - an S&P 500 annual point-to-point with a 0% Floor, 100% participation rate and non-guaranteed Cap. This Benchmark Index Account is what…
#358 | The Asset Side
Quick Take Now that the liquidity crisis in banking seems to have ebbed, a new potential crisis is emerging - credit. There is a real and growing prospect of significant losses in certain asset classes that have enjoyed more than…
#357 | The Multi-Verse of 7702 Rates
This article was written by Steve Cox, FSA, MAAA, who is the Head of Life Insurance at Life Innovators. Earlier this year, I wrote an article talking about the impact of rising interest rates on Section 7702. The main takeaway…
#355 | A Financial Strength Gut Check
Quick Take Life insurer financial strength is arguably made up of three primary components - operations, assets and liabilities. The first two are well-handled by traditional resources such as financial strength ratings, but implicit in those ratings is the assumption…
#354 | SVB, Liquidity & Life Insurance
Quick Take The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank has shaken confidence in the financial system and raised questions about whether life insurers could find themselves in a similar situation. At first blush, the data is not comforting. SVB's unrealized capital…
AG 49-B Article – Aspire Magazine
I wrote this article for Aspire Magazine, but I thought I would reprint it here on The Life Product Review because it’s a concise description of the history of Indexed UL illustration regulation and the forthcoming revisions to AG 49-A,…
#351 | Rising Rates & Policy Loans
Quick Take One of the most obvious and profound impact of rising interest rates has been on variable policy loan interest rates that are pegged to the Moody's Composite both in participating loans in Indexed UL and in non-direct recognition…
#348 | The Next Front in the IUL Illustration War?
Quick Take In each round of the past Indexed UL regulation, the seeds of the next round were already in the ground before the final language was even adopted. The same is true for the forthcoming revisions to AG 49-A,…
#347 | The Other Kind of COI Lawsuit
Quick Take When most people think about lawsuits for Cost of Insurance rates, they're thinking about situations where life insurers increased COI rates. But what about a situation where a life insurer didn't decrease COI rates even though their mortality…
